How a community imploded

CHERYL Green was hardly the first.

Since the 14-year-old was shot to death in December in the forgotten strip of Los Angeles known as Harbor Gateway, she has become a symbol of the region’s gang and racial strife.

Yet long before the mayor, police chief and FBI director showed up to decry the violence, the tiny neighborhood lived with it.

For more than a decade, many say, the neighborhood Latino gang — called 204th Street — had been attacking blacks. African Americans had taken to warily surveying their streets for Latinos, and few dared go north of 206th Street, which the gang had set as a boundary for blacks.

In 1997, 11-year-old Marquis Wilbert, an African American youth with no gang affiliation, was shot and killed by a 204th Street gang member on a bicycle.

In September 2001, Robert Hightower, a 19-year-old Pasadena high school senior, was shot to death after hugging his sister, whom he had been visiting. A 204th Street gang member shot him, according to court testimony, because he was upset that a black boxer had beaten a Latino in a prizefight.

In 2003, Eric Butler, 39, was shot to death as he drove from the neighborhood’s lone business, the Del Amo Market, which the gang considered to be in its territory. He’d gone there to intervene after gang members began harassing his 14-year-old stepdaughter. She was shot in the back and lives today with a bullet lodged near her spine.

Butler’s wife, Madeline Enriquez, organized marches to bring attention to the problem, without success.

Instead, the violence spread.

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How a community imploded
Las Angeles Times