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Chilling effect from gangs serious

HENRY: Witnesses who testified still in hiding

The Bakersfield Californian | Saturday, Jul 18 2009 08:45 PM

Last Updated Saturday, Jul 18 2009 08:45 PM

Most of us are lucky enough that we aren't caught in this no-win situation.

You desperately want to make your gang-riddled neighborhood safer, but talking to the police makes you and your family a target.

What do you do?

I'd like to say I'd go to the cops because first and foremost, crime victims deserve a voice and, of course,

doing nothing only makes gangs stronger.

If I lived in a neighborhood plagued by gangs, however, the reality would be much more complex.

I might have known these "vicious" gang-bangers when they were children, their family might be friends or family to my own.

At the very least, they would know me, where I live, who my children are and where my friends live.

That makes me extremely vulnerable.

Which is why I can only encourage those living in areas where gang violence has exploded this year to come forward, even if only to give an anonymous tip.

But I can't, and I won't, judge them if they don't.

That leaves the Bakersfield Police Department fighting a nearly impossible battle trying to solve nine gang-related homicides, and far more shootings and assaults, that have occurred just this year.

Detectives are used to getting only scraps of information on gang killings, but for some reason, even that has dried up recently.

In an almost defeated tone, Lt. Hajir Nurridin noted that community outrage seems muted at best.

"These aren't just numbers," she said. "They're real people."

Indeed.

In January, husband and wife Curtis and Tina West, both 44, were walking home from the store in the early evening when someone walked up and blew them away.

On a soft spring night in April, 62-year-old Iva Lee Craig was killed and Mamie Foreman, 54, and Gregory Webb, 44, were shot by goons in a passing car as Craig closed the gate to her driveway.

A month later, a 30-week fetus was killed and the mother, Marisha Walker, 40, was shot multiple times, as was her husband, Anthony Walker, 49.

Also shot were Anton and Heavenly Walker -- both only 6 years old! -- as they slept in their home.

In the early hours of July 5, a family reunion was shattered when thugs walking by a home indiscriminantly fired a semi-automatic handgun into the gathering, killing Anthony Johnson, 37, of Texas and wounding four others, only one of whom was from Bakersfield.

Earlier this year, I'd hoped we might be making at least some progress on the gang front.

On April 19, Deputy District Attorney Cindy Zimmer won the crown jewel of gang convictions against Country Boy Crip gang members Corey Ray Johnson, 23, Joseph Kevin Dixon, 25, and James Oliver Wallace, 21, who went on a murderous rampage for nearly a year in 2007, attacking and shooting numerous people in separate incidents.

Killed were 19-year-old Vanessa Alcala and her unborn child and 21-year-old James Oliver Wallace, Dixon's own cousin.

Each defendant was sentenced to three life terms.

When I spoke with Zimmer about her stunning victory in a case that could easily have ended in frustration as so many other gang cases have, she credited the DA's ramped-up gang enforcement efforts, tireless police work and most important, the witnesses who truly risked everything to testify.

Three of those witnesses are still in hiding. They had to move out of state, leaving everything behind, Zimmer said.

That those witnesses hung with Zimmer was incredible and not just because of threats to them. The whole trial operated under a cloud of intimidation. Audience members were kicked out more than once for picking fights and making threats in open court.

And one juror had to be excused after his wife was approached in the grocery store and told her husband had better vote "the right way."

That is downright chilling.

But, like I said, we seemed to be making headway.

Shortly after Zimmer's win, District Attorney Ed Jagels had a news conference on April 23 trumpeting the successes of his anti-gang program saying 85 percent of the 105 so-called "gang shot callers" were either in custody, dead or on the run out of state.

Two days later, a 16-year-old girl walking with friends was shot in the leg by some coward in the backseat of a passing car. Two days after that, Craig was killed in her driveway and so on.

Sgt. Joe Aldana and I tossed reasons back and forth for the spike in gang killings and for the clampdown on information from witnesses. Could be distrust of the cops, could be fear, heck, it could even be a backlash to the increased enforcement efforts. Who knows?

The only thing we do know, and I've written whole columns on this before, is that no matter how hard Aldana and his colleagues work to solve these crimes, they'll always be on the clean-up end of gang violence.

We cannot arrest our way to safe neighborhoods, as Sheriff Donny Youngblood has told me numerous times.

It's up to us, the community, to do whatever it takes to keep kids from joining gangs in the first place.

But that's a whole other rant.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com.