Memorial Wall : Reseda School Mural Will List Victims of Urban Violence

Their first reaction when they heard their friend Lucky had been killed last February was to grab their own guns and hunt down the van involved in the fatal shooting.

But two months later, Spooky, Chubz, Mousie, Plucky and other members of the Latino gang Brown Pride are setting aside weapons for paintbrushes and honoring Luis (Lucky) Hernandez in a mural at Cleveland High School in Reseda.

The Memory Wall, as they are calling it, will include the names of other Cleveland students killed by the plagues of their time--drive-by shootings, drunk driving, suicidal parents--as well as names of a couple of teachers. The artists are also thinking of adding the name of Michael Ensley, whose gang-related killing Feb. 22 occurred at Reseda High School but still awoke echoes of sympathy among Cleveland students.

After all, a killing is a killing, the Brown Pride boys seem to be saying.

“We hope it gets it into people’s heads to stop fighting,” said Chubz, 18, who lives in Northridge. “We don’t want to be putting up a lot of names.”

In return for the privilege of immortalizing Lucky on school property, the artists have promised to erase any graffiti left there by Brown Pride comrades. The deal was struck between the 40 or so Brown Pride members on the Cleveland campus and Barbara Yanuck, a former drama teacher who now spends all her time counseling students on race relations, gang issues and family problems.

“By stopping tagging you stop cross-outs,” Yanuck said, referring to gang members’ defacing of another gang’s moniker, “and by stopping cross-outs maybe you can stop shootouts.”

In the spirit of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the Memory Wall will list the names of the dead in the pages of an open book pictured as floating among clouds.

The honored dead not only include Latino, Anglo, and African-American names, but the cooperating artists are members of sometimes rival cliques of the Brown Pride gang. Spooky, for example, belongs to Brown Pride Mafia while Chubz, Mousie, and Plucky belong to the Brown Pride Surenos (Southerners). Lucky was a Sureno, too.

As Spooky explained it, they don’t even consider Brown Pride a gang since its members aren’t necessarily from the same neighborhood and don’t defend territory. They prefer the term kickback to describe their more loosely knit association.

But while they talked of peace when it came to their mural, the artists still boasted about their easy access to guns and how they would defend to the death any member of their clique who might be threatened or offended.

“I got a 9-millimeter,” Chubz began. “It’s my dad’s, but if someone’s messin’ with me I’m not goin’ to be sittin’ down.”

Yanuck, groping for a way to explain the dichotomy, suggested that the youths “haven’t gotten to that point” where they see a clear connection between peace on the campus and peace in the streets.

She and Jack Juntilla, a youth counselor with the school district, believe that rather than glorify gang violence, the wall will serve as a stark reminder of its consequences. Yanuck also insisted that victims of other types of crime, accidents and illness be included.

“So many of our kids don’t understand the finality of death, and this is a good way of doing that,” Juntilla said.

The wall will include the names of Lucky Hernandez, 19, who died a few blocks away from the campus in a drive-by shooting Feb. 13; Rocio Delgado, 16, who was caught in a gang confrontation as she walked home from school Feb. 22; Deborah DeLeon, 17, a popular track star strangled a year ago during a trip to San Francisco with her boyfriend, who was charged with killing her; Miguel Loayza, 17, who died in 1989 of injuries received in a car accident caused by a drunk driver; Brandy Fernandez, 16, whose despondent mother shot her, her sister and her brother before turning the gun on herself three years ago; Jamel Maddox, 18, killed in a car accident last summer; Arnie Leckman, 64, the school’s football coach who died two years ago of a heart attack; Gladys Carter, a health and career planning teacher who died of cancer last year, and Linda Peltzman, 49, a school volunteer, who died last week of complications from a blood infection.