“The result of gang violence in the community is that the people who live here, the good people, feel like they’re living in a ‘reign of terror,’ ” Velasquez said. Police officials favor tough enforcement, such as last week’s sweep, as a necessary-if only short-term-solution to gang activity. Roller said: “The role models they see are driving around in (Mazda) RX7s with (telephone) beepers on their belts.” It seems that instant communication has become a business necessity even on the streets. “It’s hard to tell a kid (that) crime doesn’t pay when the guy standing next to him is wearing a $300 suit,” Fette said. The burgeoning and lucrative cocaine trade from which many gangs now profit has driven up the ante, turning street conflicts more violent and making it even harder for authorities to persuade children that they should shun the life adopted by many an older brother.
And freshly printed sweat shirts found in one house proclaimed “Lil Beeb R.I.P.”
A Nissan truck, its chassis lowered close to the ground, was also impounded as possibly the vehicle used in the Turner shooting. Word on the street was that they or other Hustler Crips had been preparing to “ride” again that night. Eric Darnell Garrett, 18, and Dennis Earl Reed, 24, were arrested on suspicion of killing Turner, a former Piru. They emerged with two shotguns, a rifle, several pistols and knives, as well as two murder suspects. Last Thursday morning, on what would have been the birthday of Charles (Beeb) Stevens, a task force of 43 officers swept into the middle-class Kelly Park neighborhood and silently encircled eight houses and a bus used as a gang “crash pad.” At 7:01 a.m., they began either knocking on doors or, in two cases, kicking them in. The Kelly Park Hustler Crips and the Lueders Park Piru had begun to war it seemed, until Velasquez and Compton police stepped between them. “It’s a wonder any of these kids reach maturity,” said David Velasquez, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney assigned to the hard-core-gang detail. Some of the pellets strayed into a nearby home and peppered the living room couch only inches from where an 8-year-old boy sat watching television. Turner died-an apparently random target who happened to be standing in front of a house in Piru gang territory-and three others were wounded. Thirty-year-old Don Turner was standing in a street-corner crowd near Lueders Park, about eight blocks north, when a gunman jumped from a slowing Nissan truck and sprayed them with shotgun blasts. The following Sunday night was pay-back time. Pistol shots had been fired from a passing car, wounding two others in the group. “Beeb” Stevens was two weeks shy of his 16th birthday when a bullet ripped into his chest as he stood with some friends in Kelly Park on a recent Friday.
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