Mother’s Day Shattered by Gang Madness

Leonard Franks was always this way about gangs: He didn’t much care for initiating things, but he wanted to hang with a fun crowd, and that meant a street gang, and that meant, sooner or later, there would be trouble, and if you were going to be down with your set, you fought.

“You be beat up every day till you join some kind of gang,” he said. “You can walk around and be a good boy, but when it comes to hanging out in a crowd, everybody moves to one side or the other, one crowd say he ain’t from my set, the other say he ain’t from my set.”

Leonard, 19, grew up in Compton, went to a trade school to learn welding and tried to put himself in the job market, but it didn’t work. So he kept hanging out. Then last year he ran into a contractor named Baxter Sinclair, who makes a specialty of hiring street gang members for his natural-gas pipeline business.

I wrote a story last month about Sinclair and Leonard and some of the other gang members-turned-laborers. The story received a lot of attention and produced a lot of warm, thankful sighs of relief because it showed what many people who have dealt with street gang members know: Not all of them come out of the womb destined to be killers. It’s just that sometimes there is so much trouble in the world, so many depraved people around that it washes off on you. The stain is hard to remove.

Leonard was one of these tainted young men. He had a warm personality and a good sense of humor and he lived in a home with both parents and all he really wanted from a gang--in this case, from the Bloods who call Compton’s Lime Street their neighborhood--was to belong, and to live a fast life. He was 11 when he started.

“These guys were doin’ it so I’m gonna do it. My homeboy come tap on the window, ‘Let’s go out, let’s steal a car.’ I was the littlest guy in the pack, hanging out with the big boys,” he said proudly. There were shootings, there was retaliation.

Leonard got out of crime when he began working for the Sinclair Corp. There wasn’t enough time to get into trouble, and he began to like it that way. He had enough money to get his own place. “He’d tell me, ‘I love my job,’ ” his mother, Normal Franks, said. But he did not isolate himself from his pals in the ‘hood. Thousands of gang members go through this. They come out of the craziness enough to pursue jobs and families, but not enough to escape the violence around them.

Leonard went to his parents’ house for Mother’s Day and left about 5 in the afternoon. He hooked up with Jimmy Moody, 20, a neighborhood buddy who had moved to Chino Hills last year and had driven back for a visit. They stopped at a corner hamburger stand at 81st Street and Avalon Boulevard in South Los Angeles, where Moody went to use a pay phone. The two were standing together when a car drove up and the words were shouted: “What’s up, Cuz?”

It was the protocol of murder, Crips greeting Bloods by addressing them as Cuz, shorthand for Crip.

Theoretically, Leonard and Moody were in a safe place. This was a Blood neighborhood, Moody said. But Crips vastly outnumber Bloods. Nowhere is safe. This was part of the daily madness. As best as Moody could figure it, it was a couple of Crips invading rival territory, intent on picking off somebody, anybody, who looked like a Blood.

Neither young man had enough time to turn fully around.

They shot Moody first. The bullet passed through his side. He left the hospital on Monday.

They shot Leonard next. Twice. One of the bullets damaged his spinal cord. He could not move his legs. He was lying semiconscious in a private room of Martin Luther King Medical Center on Monday. Sinclair and Mrs. Franks waited outside.

“We always tried to teach him to go the right way,” Mrs. Franks said stoically.

“This is madness here,” Sinclair said, his voice shaking. “Here’s a boy that sat there--he worked for me Saturday, operating a crane, and my last words were, ‘Take your mom some flowers, stay off the street.’ ”

Moody and Mrs. Franks said neither young man was wearing clothes that would overtly mark them as Bloods. Moody said he hadn’t been able to tell who the shooter was, but he thought a friend might know. Some younger friends of the victims came to the hospital. “Time for a showdown,” one of them muttered.

“This is madness,” Sinclair repeated. “This is Vietnam here.”