by Ian Graham
Unaware of the gang members’ presence, a Cathedral High student bobbed on the dance floor wearing a California Angels baseball cap with the letters CA linked together on the front. The Cathedral kid didn’t look or act like a gangster, but in the gang parlance of Highland Park, the letters CA stood for the Cypress Avenue gang, a faction of The Avenues that was a rival to the Highland Park gang.
Moments later, Arturo Torres felt a hard object jab into his ribs. Before he could look down, he heard a voice over his shoulder. “Where you from?” asked the person pressing into his side what Torres now realized was a gun. Though he wasn’t in a gang, Torres knew the code. He was being “hit up,” challenged to identify his gang affiliation. Startled, Torres turned to see the three gang members surrounding him.
“I’m not from anywhere,” Torres said truthfully, hoping to defuse things.
“Then why don’t you take off your fucking hat?” demanded the gang member holding the gun.
“It’s cool,” Torres stammered, taking off his Angels cap. “We’re all Mexicans.” Momentarily appeased, the gangster withdrew the gun, and he and the other two gang members walked away.
A few minutes later, Bryan Villalobos, another Cathedral student, was confronted by the same gang members. “I’m Pee Wee from Highland Park,” one of them said, flashing a gun. “Where you from?”
Villalobos, too, realized he was being hit up and tried to defuse the situation. “I’m not from nowhere,” he responded honestly. But by this time, Martin Aceves, Lauro Mendoza, and a few other Cathedral boys had noticed what was happening to their friends and were coming over to help. The gang members and the Cathedral boys squared off for a moment, until someone on the Cathedral side shouted, “TAC!” the initials of a local “tagging crew” called Tag All Cities, who spray-painted their “tag” and other graffiti around neighborhoods to mark their territory. Tagging crews are usually nonviolent, but some are affiliated with violent gangs.
Instantly Pee Wee’s fist slammed into Lauro Mendoza’s jaw, knocking him to the ground. As the Cathedral boys jumped in to help their friend, a violent brawl erupted, stopping the party cold. The fight quickly spread from the dance floor and across the yard toward the tarp blocking the driveway, as other partygoers stood back, pleading for the fighting to stop. Laurie Nevarez, whose aunt’s house was being used for the party, and her friends screamed for help as they moved back toward the rear of the yard, where Mario and the Ramirez brothers stood watching the fight.
Less than a minute later, shortly before midnight, a volley of three or four shots cracked from the middle of the fight. Frightened screams erupted and panicked feet pounded on the pavement as terrified teenagers fled from the backyard down the driveway and toward the street, knocking the tarp aside. Seconds later, a second volley of shots rang out as someone fired down the driveway at the fleeing crowd.
Near the rear of the yard, Martin Aceves, the honor student bound for college, lay on his back with a thirty-five-caliber bullet in his chest, taking his last breaths. Anthony Moscato, another Cathedral student, ran down Ebby Avenue with blood pouring from his left hand, which had been grazed by a bullet as he fled.
The shooting made the Sunday papers, with the Los Angeles Times running a front-page headline: “Highland Park Gang Members Crash Party, Cathedral Honor Student Killed.” With the national spotlight already illuminating LA’s gang problem, there was pressure on the police to make arrests and break up the Highland Park gang as they had The Avenues. In the days following the murder, detectives from the LAPD’s Northeast Division interviewed witnesses and took statements from people who had attended the party. Within a week, Raymond Rivera (Cartoon) and Richard Guzman (Pee Wee) were arrested and charged with Aceves’s murder and the attempted murder of Moscato.
But the police didn’t stop there. They re-interviewed witnesses, showing them pictures of every known and suspected Highland Park gang member, pressuring them to make additional identifications. They threatened to arrest witnesses who had nothing to do with the shootings if they didn’t cooperate in implicating those the police believed had also participated in the crime.
Two weeks later, in the middle of the night, three policemen rammed open the front door of Virginia Rocha’s house on San Pasqual Avenue. Bounding up the stairs, they burst into Mario’s bedroom. Mario, unsure of what was happening, had thrown himself on the floor where he lay flat on his stomach as the policemen entered. One of the policemen kicked Mario in the head as another placed him in handcuffs. As they led Mario out of the house, the policemen passed Virginia standing terrified by her shattered front door.
One of the officers shouted over his shoulder, “We’re arresting your son for murder.”
CHAPTER 7
Dreams of Freedom
MARIO ROCHA did not go home. Assuming it was all a mistake that would be cleared up quickly, he waived his right to an attorney. He was interrogated, charged with the murder of Martin Aceves and the attempted murder of Anthony Moscato, and locked up in LA’s Central Juvenile Hall for two years while awaiting trial.
It was there that Mario’s intelligence, his gift for writing, and his demeanor of innocence caught the attention of an extraordinary Catholic nun.
LOS ANGELES, LATE FALL 1999 AND BEFORE
SISTER JANET HARRIS was sixty-eight years old when she pushed through the revolving glass doors and entered the marble lobby of Latham & Watkins’s downtown LA office building in the fall of 1999. She was 5′3″, small-boned, with closely cropped white hair, a round winsome face, sparkling blue eyes, and a natural grace that made her look a decade or two younger.
She was attractive and, for a nun, stylish. The heels of her black boots clicked as she walked across Latham’s polished floor pulling behind her a small aluminum dolly holding two battered cardboard boxes, one on top of the other, held in place by a worn bungee cord. The buses had been quicker than she’d expected, and she was a half hour early for her three o’clock appointment with Bob Long.
Janet checked in with the receptionist on the fortieth floor and took a seat on a couch, watching as young people with intelligent, intense faces and armloads of documents passed through the lobby. She picked up one of Latham’s promotional brochures and smiled as she read about the firm’s dedication to pro bono work. She had a good feeling about this place. Things were going to work out this time. They had to. She had been trying for three years to get a competent lawyer to take the case in her boxes, and she was getting desperate. By this point, the case was as much about her life — her faith in God and humanity — as it was about Mario.
AS A CHILD growing up in a working-class neighborhood of upper Manhattan, Janet Harris had dreamed of becoming an actress. She spent her weekends and summer days hanging around the Broadway theaters, staring at the poster boards for Oklahoma! and South Pacific. But one afternoon, when she tagged along with her mother to the nearby Cloisters museum of medieval art, she was captivated by the illuminated manuscripts; her awakening to the Church began. When her family moved to San Francisco, Janet entered the teaching order of the Presentation Sisters. She was seventeen and newly graduated from high school. Art, Janet liked to say, had led her to God.
After moving to Los Angeles in her forties to pursue a master’s degree in communications at Loyola University, Janet took a job teaching English at a high school in a low-income, mostly Latino neighborhood near downtown LA. She was a natural teacher, taking an interest in each of her students, listening to them without judgment and talking to them with respect. Janet marveled at their natural intelligence and creativity. Most of them were tough kids from single-parent families. She felt strongly that they were as intelligent and able, if not more so, than private-school kids in the suburbs. She often quoted to them a line from one of her favorite books, To Kill a Mocking-bird: “Fine folks are people who do the best they can with the sense they have.”
Janet noticed that neighborhood kids, many of them members of the local Eighteenth Street gang, were climbing the s
chool fence on weekends to use the school’s soccer field. Instead of notifying security, she decided to watch them herself. Week after week, she observed them from the bleachers. “It was like watching a ballet,” she would later recall. “I could tell who the gang members were by how they carried themselves.”
The kids were initially skeptical of the white lady in the bleachers, but Janet had an almost telepathic way of connecting to teenagers, and they soon became comfortable with her presence and began opening up to her. “I could tell if they were lying to me by their body language and tone of voice, and they knew it,” she said. At one point, when a rival gang member in a passing car fired shots toward the field, one of the kids pushed Janet to the ground and shielded her with his body until the shooting stopped.
The police put pressure on Janet to tell them what she knew about the gang, but she refused, saying it was not her place to talk. This earned her still more trust from the teenagers. For her master’s thesis, she filmed a documentary on the Eighteenth Street and Temple Street gangs. “It was fascinating to me. I realized how naïve I was. I understood teenagers, but I didn’t understand what was happening on the streets around me,” she said.
Sister Janet learned about the realities and nuances of the neighborhood. Some of the kids were hardcore gang members and sociopaths. But many of them, although they wore baggy pants and talked with street slang, weren’t part of a gang or criminally involved. They were merely neighborhood kids who had been labeled as gang members by the police because of the way they looked, the neighborhood they grew up in, and the friends they had known since childhood.
The more she observed and learned about these kids, the more wary Janet became of the way the police and prosecutors seemed to blindly lump them all together, branding them as “gang members” and using the words as code for “criminal.” “I saw a lot of these kids being arrested for minor, petty things,” Janet said. “The police and DA’s office would always add a gang charge to increase the punishment. One of my students, a fourteen-year-old freshman, was arrested for smoking a cigarette! He was just sitting on the curb with his brother, minding his own business. Next thing you know, the prosecutor is calling him a gang member and charging him with loitering and criminal mischief! You think that happens in Bel Air? These kids didn’t have anyone to stick up for them, so I decided to do something about it.”
Word of her work with gangs and local teenagers quickly spread. Janet was offered a job with the County Probation Department, as a community liaison — a communication link between the department and the neighborhood. She also began working at Central Juvenile Hall, as the Catholic chaplain.
Deeply appalled at how many boys and girls in their mid-teens were being tried as adults and given harsh sentences, often on the basis of tenuous gang connections, Janet began speaking out against what she saw as an increasingly punitive juvenile justice system. She appeared on radio shows and at rallies, speaking about the danger of incarcerating teens in adult prisons: “Research in brain science says that the brain isn’t fully developed at fourteen or fifteen. Anyone who has raised a teenager knows that they’re impulsive, they’re often peer-pressured, and they act sometimes before they think. Often young people don’t have the moral strength to survive in the adult prison environment. Drugs are so available inside those prisons, and gang membership is often the only way to survive.”
When Governor Pete Wilson, in a speech staged outside Juvenile Hall, said, “The best form of prevention is to get the message across that adult crimes carry adult price tags,” Janet confronted him. “I don’t agree with what you just said. Kids just don’t think like that.” The governor responded, “Well, I wouldn’t expect a nun to understand,” and walked off.
Janet became a frequent, sometimes unwelcome, visitor to Sacramento, meeting with state politicians about reforming California’s juvenile justice system, which had swelled to the largest in the nation. She networked to find jobs for kids who were released from Juvenile Hall and helped kids learn skills they would need in an office setting. She was, as Edward Humes said of her in his book, No Matter How Loud I Shout, about a year in the juvenile court system “someone who cares more about their futures than their pasts.”
Sometimes Janet’s frustration with the juvenile justice system turned personal, as when one of her former students, a sixteeen-year-old girl named Silvia Sanchez, was arrested and charged as an adult for a murder she had nothing to do with, even by the prosecutor’s admission. Silvia and her boyfriend had driven to the beach in the LA suburb of Venice to meet some friends. The boyfriend, several years older than Silvia and violently abusive, told Silvia he had borrowed the car from a friend. While Silvia was at the beach with friends, the car’s owner confronted the boyfriend in a parking lot and demanded his car back. In a struggle for the keys, Silvia’s boyfriend stabbed the owner seventeen times, killing him. Only on the way home did he tell Silvia what had happened, adding that if she said anything to anyone he would kill her and her “retard mother.” Terrified, Silvia refused to talk to the district attorney, and she was charged as an accessory to the murder.
Janet went to bat for Silvia. Given that the DA’s office had many other witnesses to the murder and didn’t need Silvia’s testimony for a conviction, Janet felt that the DA was using Silvia as example of what happens to people who don’t cooperate. She met with the district attorney, pleading with him to drop the case, but he brushed her aside — saying the city was at war with gangs — and walked out. She called the state attorney general and all the other high-level politicians she knew. They all said, one way or another, “If she’s innocent, the jury will let her walk.”
Days before Silvia’s trial was to begin, Janet confronted the prosecutor on the case, a young deputy district attorney, in the hallway of the courthouse. “How can you do this?” Janet asked her. “This isn’t justice.”
The prosecutor pulled Janet aside and confided, “Between you and me, I hate this case. I don’t have the heart for this. This girl doesn’t deserve this.”
“So why are you doing it?” Janet asked.
“Because I was told to,” said the prosecutor.
But once in court, that same prosecutor described Silvia to the jury “as if she were Charlie Manson,” Janet said. Janet was there when Silvia was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The case shook Janet deeply. “What kind of faith can you have in a system that could incarcerate Silvia Sanchez for life?” she said. She was determined to help Silvia and perhaps naïve enough to think she could.
Janet spent all her political capital and wore out her welcome pleading with the DA’s office to reopen Sylvia Sanchez’s case, badgering politicians to consider a pardon, and looking for an attorney to appeal Silvia’s case pro bono. Finally, a young lawyer agreed to take a look at the case. He spent months poring over the trial transcripts and police files before calling Janet into his office to give her his assessment. The case, he agreed, was a horrible miscarriage of justice and should never have gone to trial. But it did, and the prosecutor had done a very good job. Under the law, Silvia was, technically, an accomplice, and there was very little that could be done at this stage. He added what Janet knew: once a person is convicted they no longer have the presumption of innocence and it takes a miracle to overturn the conviction, even one as obviously unjust as Silvia’s.
“Loyalty to a lie,” Janet called it.
For many years, Janet’s main job was to oversee religious services and coordinate volunteer activities at Central Juvenile Hall. The activity closest to her heart was a writing program called InsideOUT Writers, which she and author Karen Hunt had created in 1994. The program wasn’t about writing excellence, punctuation, or grammar. Instead, it focused on giving incarcerated teenagers a chance to express themselves and to feel that someone was listening. The teachers, Karen Hunt and Duane Noriyuki, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, didn’t tell their students what to write or judge them on their content or message. Instead
they listened, encouraging the students to think for themselves and to write honestly.
In mid-1996, Janet heard about a new inmate at Juvenile Hall who was gaining a reputation for writing plays in the hall’s theater program. She invited him to join Duane’s writing class. Janet, who often attended the classes to listen, observe, and encourage, had read about his case in the newspaper: A Cathedral High School student had been shot and killed by gang members who crashed a party in Highland Park. The student was sixteen and didn’t look or carry himself like a gang member. He had no tattoos and was polite and deferential to Duane and the other staff. “I just had a sense about him: he didn’t belong in this place,” Janet would say.
The class had adopted a rule that new students read first. After the kids were given thirty minutes to write, Janet listened closely as Mario Rocha stood up and read:
Night after night, I sit in my lonely room looking out my tainted window, absorbing the dark abandoned fields, and I think, what kind of life is this? I stare at the large trees that distantly shroud these buildings and think, this is not the way I want to live. In the midst of my troublesome feelings I lower my head in sadness.
Janet and the teachers never judged the kids in the writing program on the content or quality of their work, caring only that they behaved themselves and gave a decent effort. Janet knew most of them wrote about gangs and crime, the life they had lived on the streets, and the bad decisions they had made. For most, this was a tacit admission of guilt. In class after class, Mario’s writing was different. He wrote about his family and his future. “He wrote truthfully. He never embroidered his thoughts,” she said.
Of his time in the writing program, Mario wrote, “I searched for words to expose the cave of my soul. I poured forth my fears, doubts, and perplexities on paper, and I began to understand my life, who I was and why.”
Janet was curious. Her well-trained eye told her that this kid was not a gang member. And he did not seem at all like a murderer. “Duane showed me Mario’s work,” she said later, “and I began to question some of the issues raised in his essays. I can get the truth out of a rock. I talked to people who had been at the party and they told me, ‘Absolutely not. Mario had nothing to do with it.’”
