Fighting The Code of Silence

By James Willwerth/Santa Ana

The bloody scene was bad enough: six people were wounded; two, a 17-year-old and a boy of four, lay dead, cut down by automatic gunfire in Garden Grove, Calif. But what infuriated Ralph Rodriguez, a cousin of the dead child's, was that not one witness was willing to tell police what everyone knew: the slaughter was a revenge killing by the 5th Street gang from nearby Santa Ana, where Rodriguez lives. "I started screaming, and I made people talk to the police," he recalls. "I knew everybody they named as the shooters. I knew all their families." Rodriguez, 32, helped investigators gather testimony and even permitted police to question his eleven-year-old son, who saw the alleged killers in a pickup truck.

In Southern California's sad subculture of gang violence, such stand-up citizenry is rare. "This was a big break for law enforcement," explains Orange County Deputy District Attorney Tom Avdeef. "The gangs rule the neighborhoods like terrorists." Rodriguez would learn just how in the weeks that followed.

After police raided the gang's headquarters, seizing weapons and arresting four 5th Streeters, the nightmare began. A Molotov cocktail cracked Rodriguez's bedroom window; gang members marauded nightly through the * neighborhood; a suspect's father and his cronies camped out on Rodriguez's doorstep, screaming death threats. Squad cars always seemed to arrive after the tormentors had left. Rodriguez moved his children to the bedroom floor and pushed furniture against the windows. To protect his living room, he parked the family truck in the front yard and took up sentry duty by the front door.

One afternoon in early November after cruising gang members twice tried to run down his son, the beleaguered auto mechanic finally lost his cool. Rodriguez fired a semiautomatic pistol into the air from his backyard to signal that he'd been pushed far enough. Neighbors called the police, who this time arrived within minutes and arrested Rodriguez. "I begged them not to take me and leave my family without protection," he remembers bitterly. But Ralph Rodriguez went to jail.

Only a protest from the mother of the four-year-old murder victim got the attention of authorities, who had apparently lost track of Rodriguez because he lived in a different police jurisdiction. Rodriguez was released the next day without bail, and investigators put together a "witness harassment" case that eventually led to three more arrests. Police now responded to 911 calls within minutes, unmarked cars watched the block, and uniformed patrols cruised by regularly.

The gang's power to terrorize was slipping. One gangster claimed to have taken out a $3,000 "contract," which came to nothing; another pointed a pistol at the Rodriguez home -- but was arrested. "Despite all the bad things that have happened, I still believe in the system," says the amazingly resilient Rodriguez. "I actually look forward to the neighborhood getting cleaned up."