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Tales of Life and Loss at the Devonshire

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Dusty sidewalks and a broken gate definitely don’t serve as a red-carpet invite into the Devonshire Apartments in Northridge. And the building’s aging coffee-brown paint and mangled call box don’t exactly say please come in either.

But if you sit on the hood of your car and watch the tenants chug in and out like a modern American cultural train, you’ll see why it’s worth a visit.

Devonshire Apartments is Anywhere, Los Angeles.

It is a place where race means everything and nothing at all. A place that every day grapples with the eternal Southland question of “Can we all get along?” A place some people genuinely like and one others can’t wait to leave.

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And it is a place where a child’s drowning in a leaf-soaked pool four months ago tore an already loose-knit group of people further apart.

That death is not the focus of this tale. But to grasp what Devonshire Apartments is all about, you need to hear what happened in the pool last summer, and you need to meet the residents there, some eccentric, some just everyday folks trying to make it in the big city.

So step inside the entrance. Apartment No. 16 is a good place to start.

IN ‘CHILL MODE’

When they are not attending gang peace treaty meetings in Pacoima or burying themselves in a pile of beer cans and Taco Bell wrappers, easygoing Jesse Morales, 21, and his reserved roommate Robert Lopez, 19, are busy hanging out.

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You can usually find them stuck in “chill mode.” Front door wide open. Overnight visitors coming and going. And their old school funk tunes rocking the courtyard--sometimes spilling out into the air near Zelzah Avenue and Devonshire Street.

Like the cool vibes slipping from their vintage house speakers, Morales is the embodiment of the word “homeboy.” It could be the way he tilts his head when he talks or his propensity for lingering on the last word of a sentence and saying something like, “That’s cooool.”

If he is not slumped down on the couch playing video games with his compadres, Morales just drapes his arms over the rail outside his door, tugs gently on his baggy pants and stares at passersby.

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Lopez is the Tonto to Morales’ Lone Ranger.

He often injects a clever twist into conversations and frequently assumes the part of instigator during the free flow of friendly put-down jokes the two trade daily. His truck-like frame is consistently squared up against the back of a fold-out chair, his dark brown eyes keeping watch over the walkway in front of his door.

Along with their boisterous temporary live-in buddy, Gilbert Estrada, the friends have developed an unwritten dress code: pants about five sizes too big, dozens of white tank tops and flannel button-downs. They love to party and mingle with “babes.”

And, oh yeah, something else. Lopez and Morales are engineering students at nearby Cal State Northridge--Morales fights to maintain his B average and Lopez is trying to make his average grades good.

They still claim gang membership. It’s who they are. But they’re students too. Students who flash gang signs.

DISTANT NEIGHBORS

It’s not the loud music seeping through her apartment walls or the gang-style clothes of the “three compadres” that bug the hell out of their next-door neighbor Kandie Hopkins.

“Some of the people around here are respectful and some of them aren’t,” she says in an upright tone while standing in her doorway. “They’re kinda nice. It’s just the things that sometimes come with gang members that I don’t like.”

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But it’s not as if she and the guys fight. They have to live side by side, so they keep the contacts brief. Theirs is mostly a “hi and bye” thing--like lots of L.A.

As Hopkins talks, her 15-year-old son, Andrew, hovers over her left shoulder. While his long blond-brown hair makes him look vaguely like a young Kurt Cobain, 42-year-old Hopkins brings to mind a grayer version of Alice the maid from “The Brady Bunch.” As a homemaker, Hopkins spends most days playing mom to either her cats or her son.

Against the backdrop of a slightly cluttered living room, she runs her fingers through the salt-and-pepper hair above her brow. While she’s whispering about a string of bad managers, the building’s most gregarious but mysterious residents, the Le twins, stroll by.

SILENT SHEPHERDS

Two diminutive Vietnamese women who live directly under Hopkins and the compadres seem oblivious to the tensions among their neighbors.

At any given time during the day, Xuan Le and her sister, Lieu Le, shuttle through the courtyard of the 28-unit complex, sweeping and smiling. They just cruise by, cleaning and silently shepherding the building’s small posse of kids.

“They always come out and start sweeping,” Lopez says, gazing at the women. “And they watch the kids to make sure nothing happens to them.”

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The twins, who emigrated from Vietnam five years ago, speak virtually no English. In a funny way, both blend in and stand out at Devonshire Apartments. Everyone sees them sweeping and knows their edgy smiles, but no one really remembers sitting down to chat with them or even going inside their apartment.

THEY CALL HIM ‘BEAR’

Across from the immaculate and softly lit apartment of the Le twins is the home of a nipple-pierced and tattoo-laden former Hells Angel known as “Bear.” Some residents say the tattoos are more than rebel posturing. They say he is not too fond of folks who aren’t white.

One Sunday morning while Lopez and Morales are surveying the courtyard and “bumping their sounds,” burly Bear, a.k.a. Brooklyn’s own 24-year-old Barrett Lombino, comes charging up the chipped stairs of the two-story complex. He is cursing his girlfriend after an apparent spat and asks to use the telephone.

Despite a foot-stomping uproar, he is cordial and warm. It seems that Bear has not only become a regular phone user here, but has also earned frequent phone time with other neighbors.

His brief visit to the compadres’ bachelor pad shifts from playful to potentially offensive. Bear jokingly tries to pull down Estrada’s baggy shorts. Apparently, it’s a game they play often.

“What’s your real name, vato?” asks Estrada, laughing and looking at Bear. “Is it Adolf Hitler or something like that?”

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Bear laughs and darts inside the apartment to use the phone. For a guy whom some neighbors accuse of being a racist, he sure is nice to his Mexican American compadres.

“I don’t understand it at all,” says Lopez. “I have never seen any signs. He just wears those T-shirts.”

One of those T-shirts says, “Support Your Local White Boy.”

According to Bear, it is purely a form of expressing “white pride,” similar to the “No Justice, No Peace” T-shirts some blacks wore after the Rodney King verdicts.

Outspoken Bear declares that he is not a racist and can prove it. Sure, he has gotten into fights over the years, but even then he hasn’t discriminated.

“I’ll knock anybody out,” he says boldly while standing not far from the small pile of trash near his front door. “It doesn’t matter--black, white or Mexican--I don’t care. I am cool with everybody.”

Bear, who works as a sales associate for a telemarketing firm, says there was a time when the folks at the apartments did more than just tolerate each other. But that was before the drowning.

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THE DROWNING

That summer day, Aug. 5, was the kind hard-tumbling kids love--enough daytime to stutter-step with sunshine and play outside all day. Morales and Lopez were half asleep as their music blared to the corners.

Sounds of life--feet shuffling, a washing machine grinding and soft conversations--sliced through the courtyard air. Then came a voice. An ear-piercing scream from the lady from Apartment 1. A child was down. In the pool.

In an instant everyone was charging toward the pool. Not the kids! Eyes usually pushed toward the ground looked toward each other. Who is it? One man jumped in and pulled the boy out. Some just stood there. Two feverishly tried CPR, pounding on the tiny chest. Others called 911. Save him! Somebody save him!

After paramedics arrived and whisked him away, 2-year-old Gavonni Lamont Wright was pronounced dead less than an hour later at Granada Hills Hospital.

THE AFTERMATH

Before “Vonni” died, residents say, there was more card playing, late-night partying and corridor exchanges that went beyond a sullen “Hi.”

“It had a big impact on me when Gavonni died,” Hopkins says. “He was such a sweet little guy. He would come knock on my door and talk.”

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Wright’s death frayed the thin thread that was holding it all together, however loosely, at Devonshire Apartments. A few weeks after his death, his parents moved.

The pool has not been used since that scorching summer evening. “Every time I look at it, I see him,” Lopez says.

Annette Bentley had become good friends with Vonni’s parents, going out to eat, sharing glasses of wine, apartment-sitting or just listening when times got hard. They were an extended family. Now that’s all gone, Bentley says.

Her 3-year-old son, Nathan, still asks about his former playmate. “Every now and then he’ll mention him,” says Bentley. “I don’t think he will ever forget Gavonni.”

No one saw the boy fall in.

About a month after the drowning, Gavonni’s parents filed a civil lawsuit against the building’s owner at the time, its insurance company and the building’s manager, C.B.A. Properties Management Inc. In the lawsuit, Michelle Demus and Anthony L. Wright allege that the pool’s gate had a broken handle, allowing their son to enter.

Conrad Baker, a C.B.A. official, says the boy drowned after another tenant left the gate open while the boy was near the pool. The case is pending.

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In any event, a new fence has been erected around the pool’s perimeter.

A RELUCTANT TENANT

Pauline Palma, a 17-year-old student at Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, doesn’t care about building unity. “I don’t like it around here,” she says with finality as she lugs a laundry bag up the stairs to her apartment.

While she delivers her I’m-fed-up-with-this-place speech, she pushes up her round eyeglasses.

She says she fears that the possible presence of drugs, alcohol and gang members in the complex might somehow spoil or influence her hopes of joining the Army and becoming a nurse.

The Northridge earthquake forced her to live here with her father, an ice cream truck driver, she says. She hasn’t found her niche and doesn’t particularly want to. Other than a nod “hello” or conversations with one or two select neighbors, Palma doesn’t talk to anyone.

‘SMILING JIMMY’

Jimmy Lopez, who lives a few doors down from Robert Lopez and Morales, knows how fast change can come.

In just a few months, the guitar-strumming sandwich maker at the Subway shop next door has gone from living alone to moving in his girlfriend and their two children. Lopez says paying $600 for a two-bedroom--the average rent here--is why he stays around. Plus, he can shuttle off to work in about 30 seconds.

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Commuting benefits aside, Jimmy Lopez says there are pitfalls that appear when living among such a diverse group.

“The only problem with the building other than the poor upkeep is that sometimes the white people are too serious and try to tell people what to do,” says a smiling Lopez on a quick break from Subway. “They try to complain all the time about people having fun. Having fun is cool with me. I want to have fun too.”

Enjoying life is his rallying call. In fact, “Smiling Jimmy” should be his moniker. It’s hard to imagine the laid-back aspiring musician getting angry about anything.

Lopez isn’t particularly a fan of the apartments. But--even though his little friend Gavonni died here--he says it’s not such a bad place to call home.

PREPARING TO LEAVE

Bentley, born and raised in Granada Hills, is full of optimism when talking about every topic except living at Devonshire Apartments.

Like virtually every resident, Bentley, 24, says the building’s physical shortcomings aren’t as bad as one scurrying, nagging problem--cockroaches.

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They stampede through the building, she says, sometimes ending up in clothes or the ears of children. She even put together a petition, signed by most of the residents, begging the owners to fix the place up. Some changes have come, such as a repaired roof.

Baker admitted that the building, which was built in 1963, had maintenance problems. But he attributed them to the past owners, who were forced into receivership last year. Since the bank took over the apartments, he said, C.B.A. has tried to improve living conditions.

Even so, Bentley, her fiance and son are moving in a few months, partly out of frustration, partly to escape reminders of Gavonni.

Her departure will be but one example of how tenants move through the building like the bustling traffic that zooms through Southern California. New tenants angle U-Haul trucks out front every few weeks. New faces. New languages.

Change is constant.

THE STORIES THEY TELL

Robert Lopez and Morales can weave a good tale, and the complex gives them plenty of material. There’s the one about the guy who complained to the building manager about Morales’ Mexican flag hanging in his bedroom window, citing it as “un-American.”

“He came up here talking a bunch of stuff,” says Morales. “We thought he was an FBI agent.”

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They laugh.

Morales’ flag still waves silently in his window.

Some stories are far more serious though, especially the one about neighbors who are a little loud.

“There is a bunch of domestic violence right there,” Morales says, glancing at the murky pool and then pointing to an apartment where neighbors say barroom-style fighting takes place.

“They slam doors and fight constantly,” says another neighbor.

Homemaker Hopkins doesn’t need to hear any of Morales’ building gossip. She has plenty of stories of her own.

Someone siphoned gas out of her car, she says, and she tires of the graffiti that has become a permanent part of her mailbox.

Somebody even swiped her door knocker.

And the changes continue. Even the compadres moved recently, lured by a cheaper apartment.

RACIAL UNDERCURRENTS

Even with these universal signs of urban decay, there are moments when the building is a great place to live. On a sunny Wednesday afternoon, when the weather is nice and everybody has just gotten paid, smiles abound and pitching in becomes a reality.

At dusk, the Le twins glide through the courtyard, using their brooms or hands to pick up trash. They stare for a moment at the mishmash of tenants, then return to their task. It is then that the building takes on a sleepy glow.

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On these days, idealistic unity may seem to battle the mean heart of Southern California.

In private conversations, nearly all of the residents mention race or culture subtly, insisting it is not the reason they judge their neighbors. But sometimes it is.

Yet race didn’t mean much to Nathan and Gavonni. Nathan is white, his former playmate was black. When they became friends, their parents did too.

And the Le twins may be invisible glue that not only holds together Devonshire Apartments, but, symbolically, every other place where different people must live together and interact.

Beyond all the gossiping, racial tension and the never-ending struggle of just making it through another day at the apartment, is the quiet perseverance of the twins, who look after children who are not their own.

And the safety of the kids is one thing everybody can agree on, even if they can’t agree on anything else.

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