10 years ago, Napa woke up to gang life

By CARLOS VILLATORO
Register Staff Writer

For years, Gavin Smith thought the biggest nuisance in his neighborhood was the traffic that ignored the 25 miles per hour speed limit while driving past his Brown Street home. But that changed on May 16, 1998, when a young gang member was shot and killed in front of Smith’s house.

Garrett Elshere was driving by the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Brown Street with passenger Michael Arreguin when the tire of his brown Buick Riviera blew out. Smith stepped out of his house and the teens told him they were trying to get a spare tire, Smith recalled. After a brief conversation, Smith went back into his home — only to return about 15 minutes later, when he heard loud pops.

“I was on the phone and all of a sudden I heard what sounded like firecrackers,” he said. “My wife told me that they were gunshots.”

A carload of Sureño gang members had driven by and shot at Elshere and Arreguin, 18, who was affiliated with the rival Norteños. A bullet struck Arreguin in the neck, killing him.

Smith walked out to witness the turmoil of what turned out to be Napa’s first gang homicide.

“I ran outside and at that point there was just a massive amount of kids coming and going in cars,” Smith said. “There were like 40 kids out here, it was just chaos. And then as it dispersed, there was a young man in the street right here, and a little while later the police came and he was rolling around in the street ... slapping his hand on the street. I asked the police officer why he was doing that and he said that the bullet was still moving in his brain ... It was gruesome.”

Paramedics took Arreguin to Queen of the Valley Medical Center, where he died. The murder served as a wake-up call to Smith and the community at large.

Fighting an old problem

Arreguin’s death brought gang violence into the spotlight, but the problem had long been a thorn in the side of Napa’s Latino community. Some had risked it all in efforts to bring the tension down.

After hearing about a rash of gang fights and stabbings in 1992, Isaac Perez decided to try and reach out to gang members and stop the fighting.

On a cold evening in September 1992, six years before the Arreguin murder, Perez drove his van through Napa looking for gangsters. The owner of Los Vitrales Restaurant (now the site of Don Perico Mexican Restaurant), Perez found what he was looking for at the 7-11 on Jefferson Street and Pueblo Avenue.

Nervous because of what he was about to do, Perez parked near a group of about 70 Sureños and rolled down his window.

“I told them ‘I need your help,’” Perez recalled earlier this year. “They told me ‘Yes, jefe (boss). Who can we kill? Who can we hurt? Do you want some marijuana?’ I said no, no, I just need your help. My business is not doing very good. So I need you to go to my restaurant and try my food.”

Perez handed out cards with the name, address and telephone number of his restaurant; He also gave instructions to his wait staff to feed the gang members and treat them respectfully. A few weeks later, he recalled, the first couple of gangsters walked into Los Vitrales; weeks after that another pair came in.

Perez spoke with the gang members and eventually gained their trust. He put some of them to work in his restaurant and found jobs for others in Napa vineyards.

“After eight months, we agreed that I was going to talk with the two main guys (of the rival gangs) at 5 a.m.,” he said. “We did, and we went to have breakfast at Butter Cream Bakery. They didn’t want to talk. Well, I told them that ‘You promised that you were going to help me with my business,’ so (we went to Los Vitrales and) I got a sack of onions, tomatoes and bell peppers. I told them ‘You are going to chop them. There’s a bunch of sharp knives. I’m going to work in the front.’ Five minutes later, I listened and they were talking. I thought ‘This is going to work.’”

After their mini-shift ended, Perez persuaded the boys to bring their friends to Fuller Park to enter into a peace treaty.

“They went to the park, and I thought that it was going to be 10 guys. It was about 100 guys ... and then I got kind of scared,” he said. “So I called First Christian Church ... (and) I asked them to let me borrow their all-purpose room. Some of them said no. In the end, some of the elders told them ‘Give Isaac the key. If they are going to burn the church, then they will.’”

The gangsters didn’t burn the church. Instead they entered into a year-long peace treaty that minimized gang conflicts.The effort took its toll on Perez and Los Vitrales.

“I didn’t take good care of my business because I was spending a lot of time with them,” he said. “Sometimes, I got home at midnight and they were waiting for me. They needed some help, they needed to talk to somebody, so we would go back to the restaurant and man, I was tired.”

Some of Perez’s customers were intimidated and eventually stopped eating there, he said. Perez closed his business in 1998, the year Michael Arreguin died.

Prevention, intervention, suppression

The Arreguin murder marked the first time that the fighting between Norteños and Sureños, two of California’s largest gangs, had taken someone’s life in Napa. Arreguin’s death would become the inspiration for a youth violence prevention coalition involving nearly every law enforcement agency in the county, some nonprofit agencies, faith-based groups and community leaders.

Identifying the principle goals of prevention, intervention and suppression of gang activity in Napa County, the council set out to quell violence and hold accountable the individuals responsible for the Arreguin killing — and those who instigated retaliatory shootings in its wake.

The Napa Police Department set up a four-member gang unit, its first; the Napa County District Attorney’s Office for the first time hired a special gang prosecutor and investigator; community groups such as Nuestra Esperanza, started by community activist Felix Bedolla, worked to steer kids clear of gangs; churches hosted late-night basketball games to keep kids off the streets; the Napa Valley Unified School District placed school resource officers — essentially police officers who worked to know and gain the trust of gang members and potential gang members — on high school and middle school campuses; a scholarship fund, If Given A Chance, was established to help troubled teens pay for college.

Arreguin’s killers, Jacob Hutchins, Gonzalo Alcala, Jose Marin and Robert Cendejas, were arrested and convicted.

Arreguin’s death “was obviously a tragic event, such a loss to the community,” said Leon Garcia, then a nurse at Napa State Hospital and an activist in the Spanish-speaking community who is now mayor of American Canyon. “There was great concern and outrage at the gang behavior, at the taking of a life.”

Garcia was fed up, as were other members of the community. One of the retaliatory shootings took place near Mayacamas Village, a low-income apartment complex on Old Sonoma Road.

“We went over to Mayacamas, I just went over and saw some kids playing some soccer,” Garcia said. “We ended up with a street-corner meeting at Mayacamas and had somebody from the town center come over.”

The meeting at Mayacamas led to more talk about positive activities for young people and the creation of a soccer team. Supervised by neighborhood leaders, teens would play soccer and come together to talk about gangs and other negative influences in their lives.

“People started paying more attention and started talking to their kids earlier and watching situations earlier so they caught it before it got out of hand,” said Jim King, found of If Given A Chance. “The community as a whole realized it had to pull together rather than think about it as ‘us and them,’ and ask, ‘How do we heal ourselves?’”

With law enforcement and programs such as Nuestra Esperanza and If Given A Chance, actions of community leaders such as Perez, Garcia and countless others, Napa went many years without a gang killing.

“It has been relatively quiet over the years with little peaks once in awhile of gang activity,” said King, who now serves on the Napa County Planning Commission. “I still don’t see the kind of gang activity witnessed over the last few years as being as high level and dangerous and scary as what we were beginning to see in the mid-’90s. It is getting somewhat reminiscent of those days when we first put the group together.”

King said: “I see this recent string of incidents as a call to action for our community. That does not always mean to strap on guns and badges and ‘let’s go get them.’ What we need to work on is something that will give kids a sense of belonging. Zero tolerance, but an open door to the future. We have to approach it in the same way that we did back then.”

Register Staff Writer Jillian Jones contributed to this report.

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