The boardroom of the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District was packed wall to wall with people on Jan. 28. They gathered there in an attempt to address a dire situation in Santa Maria: the eruption of street violence leaving local youth and adults bleeding in the streets.
It was the first One Community Action Coalition gathering of the new year and included school educators and administrators, local politicians, law enforcement, community group members, church leaders, and concerned citizens—more than have ever attended the meetings before.
Since the group’s last monthly coalation meeting, on Dec. 17, seven homicides have occurred. Three of those happened on Jan. 25, just days before the most recent meeting. Homicide victims included 15-year-old Marcos Ramos, who was stabbed to death in the afternoon not far from his school, Pioneer Valley High, followed by a double shooting that left Alexis Morales and Augustin Montano-Barajas dead later that night.
In January and the last week of December alone, the city experienced more than half the number of homicides committed during the entire year of 2015, which broke records for violent murders in the city.
Tense questions opened the meeting after Santa Maria Police Department Sgt. Russell Mengel addressed the group and provided an update on the situation, sharing what information he could about the cases.
A junior high school administrator complained that “what’s out on the streets is mirrored at our school.” An organizer with a community group shared that she’s been receiving reports from parents that kids are getting jumped after school and sports activities, on their way home. She asked what the department was going to do about it, insinuating that increased patrols might disappear after a few weeks.
The last comment came from a self-described “concerned citizen,” who offered more of a statement than a question. After describing his experiences living in Greenfield and organizational efforts made there to curb youth violence, he made a clear and impassioned declaration.
“I’m a Catholic, and I like to go to St. Mary’s, and I’m afraid to walk into church at night with all the crap that’s going on,” he said, referring to the proximity of the latest shooting to the church.
“I don’t pack a gun, but I will be packing a gun, legal or illegal. I’m just going to have one,” he continued as the crowd rumbled with talking and some nervous laughter. “If someone threatens me, I’ll shoot ’em. It’s getting to the point where it’s time to take our town back from the gangs, and I’m adamant about it.”
Sgt. Mengel replied to the statement calmly, while addressing the emotion behind it, but reminded that citizens need to act safely and legally, lest they compound the problem at hand. The last 11 months in Santa Maria have seen a steady rise in street violence, with the explosive increase over the last month plunging citizens into fear, anger, and desperation to see the killing stop.
Dealing with the ordeal
Santa Maria Police Department Chief Ralph Martin didn’t mince words when he sat down to talk with the Sun two days before the coalition meeting. The appointment was made a week in advance and was kept, even though the station was buzzing with personnel, visitors, and media dealing with the repercussions of the day before—Jan. 25, one of the bloodiest days in Santa Maria’s history.
“I would say that it appears that there’s been a level of increased violence. About 60 percent to 70 percent of our homicides are due to gang members or gang associates, so there’s definitely retribution going back and forth,” he said. “So, I don’t know. ‘War?’ That could be a drug war, a turf war, whatever you want to call it. I don’t give them any credibility by saying their names, but clearly, there is a battle going on between some of our local street gangs.”
The SMPD and Martin have been the subject of criticism at Santa Maria City Council meetings during public comment, in comment sections of local media reporting online, and on social media, blaming the department for not doing enough to address the problem or make arrests.
Of all the shooting homicides from the last 11 months, the SMPD has yet to arrest or charge anyone for the crimes. There’s good reason for that, Martin argued, pointing to the character of the attacks, the speed with which they were executed, and the quality of evidence available to the department.
“In my business, it’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove, and if I can’t take it to the DA [district attorney] and get a case, then I’m spinning my wheels,” he said. “I’ve always said I get fear and apathy, but unless the public helps us, we’re not going to be able to do our job. We had officers on the scene of that double homicide last night within almost a minute; the gang suppression team that was out there heard the shots.”
Martin also cited the department’s expansion of officers and resources as proof that everything possible is being done.
The SMPD has hired 40 new officers, tripled the detective bureau, hired beat coordinators, and expanded resource officers in the schools, Martin explained. He’s also expanded the number of public security cameras in the city. So far Santa Maria has only nine camera pods, with 10 more are on the way, Martin said. He explained that the cameras aren’t monitored live or used to issue citations but to record information that could be vital in collecting intelligence on serious crimes in the city. All the new staff and technology are thanks to increased funding from the city and ballot initiatives.
The increased staff means a lot of cadets, who take time to train, Martin explained.
“It takes years to learn, so our patrol force is young, but they’re doing a great job out there,” he said. “We arrested 5,800 people last year—that’s 16 people a day. We took 115 guns off the street, which is probably just a drop in the bucket compared to what’s out there, but for the average citizen, they need to understand that these are complicated, sensitive cases that we want to ensure we are working closely with the district attorney on, because I want a conviction.”
Martin explained that he couldn’t say when arrests would be made, but that he was confident they would happen soon. He urged the public to be patient despite their fears. The greatest contribution to investigations is citizen testimony, Martin explained.
Santa Maria isn’t necessarily a unique case right now, Martin said at the recent One Community Action Coalition meeting, pointing to spikes in violence in cities larger than Santa Maria with similar demographics.
“What we’re seeing in Santa Maria is also occurring in other cities,” he said. “For instance, in Salinas there were 15 homicides in 2014, last year they had 40. Bakersfield has had 22 homicides since July 22 of last year, and we’ve seen a spike in Oxnard. We don’t have rhyme or reason, but we have gone to outside sources, we’ve reached out to our federal partners to do crime analysis.”
Martin also reminded the audience that the homicide rate in Santa Maria has historically been quite low, below national averages. According to Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics available on the SMPD’s website, Santa Maria’s homicides haven’t exceeded four each year during the five years prior to 2015, with the exception of 2011, which had seven homicides in the city. According to Martin, national averages show that for every 100,000 people, four homicides occur each year.
Also detailed in the UCR stats is the fact that Santa Maria’s violent crimes—which include homicide, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—decreased over those years as well, though 2015 was certainly a year of increased violent crimes in Santa Maria. Martin pointed out that the attacks plaguing the city are of a character not often seen in Santa Maria, regardless of the yearly statistics.
“These are not street robberies. This isn’t, you know, ‘You looked at my girlfriend wrong,’ or getting into an issue at a local store. This is targeted,” he said. “There’s multiple rounds being fired. This isn’t two or three and they run, this is 15 to 20 rounds at a time.
“It’s one thing to kill somebody, but the savagery with which these people are firing rounds, I mean, my God, they’re using machetes,” he continued. “This is savagery, and we’ve never seen this before in Santa Maria.”
Law enforcement needs to be aggressive in these cases, Martin explained, so that gang members know there will be consequences to pay. In the case of the two suspects apprehended in connection with the stabbing of Marcos Ramos, both received gang enhancements on all charges, and the unnamed 14-year-old is being tried as an adult.
Even given the severity and level of violence, Martin said that a small minority of the population is actually responsible for the crimes and that the SMPD detective bureau is working tirelessly to track down the perpetrators. It’s a grueling battle, and law enforcement feels the gravity of these situations acutely, Martin explained at the coalition meeting.
“Somebody, and I don’t remember who said it, said earlier, ‘They’re hard as rocks and as tough as nails,’” Martin said. “Well, that’s not what they’re like when we arrest them, and they’re sitting in our jail cell, and after about half an hour they’re hyperventilating, and they’re not as tough as they were an hour ago. And we tell them, ‘You know that bed that you slept in at home last night? Well, that’s the last time you’re ever going to sleep in it,’ and they cry and they cry, and they get on all fours and they cry.
“So, they might be tough as nails and hard as rocks, but they all have that little baby heart inside; they were somebody’s little boy at one time and we know that, we know that, and it chokes us up,” he added as the audience murmured in emotion. “And I want you to know that these detectives are working as hard as they can. They are taking it, I don’t want to say personally, but this is our city, this is our town, and we are going to solve these cases.”
Finding the factors
The One Community Action Coalition was assembled last year around September at the behest of the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District Director of Student Services Peter Flores, who reached out to Michael Fuentes, the program coordinator for the Santa Maria Youth and Family Center. Fuentes organized a group of colleagues from local support nonprofits, members of the faith community, and even some youth he’s counseled.
Fuentes and his colleagues and friends have years’ worth of experience in gang intervention, counseling at-risk youth, and providing positive outreach. Getting everyone together, he explained at the meeting, was just the first step in addressing the problem in a comprehensive and holistic way.
“What we talked about was what we need to do in order to try and get our kids to do something different,” Fuentes said. “This is about the gangs getting stronger and what we need to do to address it, whether it be at the elementary level, the junior high level, or the high school level.”
When all the homicides that have occurred over the last year are tallied, and the victims are compared by their ages, a disturbing trend is revealed. More than a quarter of victims are minors, close to a third are younger than 20, and the majority are younger than 30 years old.
The issue certainly affects the youth disproportionately, which is why the One Community Action Coalition is especially dedicated to youth outreach and intervention. Prevention isn’t enough, several founders argued, but it will take intervention along with a fundamental reappraisal of how the schools and law enforcement deal with the youth.
“One thing we notice about a lot of these kids is they’re beat up, and I mean beat up emotionally, because some of them have been suffering the longest because not only are they abused at home, but they are abused in the school system and by law enforcement,” Fuentes said. “And again, we’re not here to point the finger, we’re here to communicate with each other and figure out what we need to do to take back control of our children.”
The answer to the problem, Fuentes said, is in mentorship, in truly being there for kids, no matter how far gone it may appear that they are.
The guest speaker at the Jan. 28 meeting was Richard R. Ramos, an author and educator with decades of experience in gang intervention in communities like Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, where he lives. He was called to speak after the Jan. 25 stabbing death of the Pioneer Valley High School student, who was actually a student of his brother Tony Ramos.
Richard Ramos told the coalition that the most important asset in communities is parents—solid parenting is the greatest inoculation young people can receive against the allure of street gangs. He shared a story from the youth outreach and gang intervention he’s been doing in Santa Barbara, when a grandfather asked Ramos to talk with the kids and give them his perspective on a life of violence.
“I said, ‘You’re a gardener by trade, so let me tell you in a way I know you’ll understand,’” Ramos said. “If you were to walk down the street here in your neighborhood and you were to look in the yard of every home and you saw that all the flowers were wilted and dried, who would you rather spend time with, the flowers, or the gardeners?”
Ramos’ book Parents on a Mission is also a six-week curriculum he teaches to equip parents with the tools they need to keep their kids safe and supported enough to withstand the peer pressure of gangs, violence, and drugs.
For counselors like Fuentes and his colleagues, the reality is that quite often they are the most stable adults in the lives of the youth they mentor. And that’s the key, they argue: consistent mentorship, showing the most troubled youth that somebody cares about them.
One of the youngest founders of the coalition is Ramon Gallardo, who grew up surrounded by the gang lifestyle. Growing up without a father, Gallardo looked up to his older brother, who sold drugs and often had Gallardo “test the product.” Gallardo spent hours in counseling with Fuentes, but saw him as “the enemy.” It wasn’t until Gallardo served jail time that he realized who really cared about him.
“Most of the time he would just get down to my level, showed that he cared, and I never forgot that,” Gallardo told the Sun. “When I was in juvenile hall, and I would get a visit, it was Michael Fuentes, and I was like, ‘What is this guy doing?’ He was at all my court dates; he just cared. When I got out of prison, the first person I went to go see was him, because he showed he cared, showed he was there, and he was real.”
Hope and healing
On Sunday, Jan. 17, days after the double shooting on Jan. 13, the Santa Maria Foursquare Church organized a prayer walk to address the violence in the city. More than 100 churchgoers, community members, politicians, and concerned citizens joined the walk, the church’s lead pastor, Tim Mossholder, told the Sun via email.
The purpose of the walk was to unite in prayer, condemn the violence in the community, but also extend a loving hand to every Santa Marian, Mossholder explained.
“I believe Jesus loves gang members and compels me to do the same,” he wrote. “People of faith believe in the power of hope and love, and that together we can use them to turn the tide of violence and oppression.”
The weekend following the murders of Jan. 25 also saw a large community prayer walk on Jan. 30, this time led by Victory Outreach, which focuses on reforming gang members and drug addicts with the help of faith.
Richard A. Ramos, who spoke with the Sun following the One Community Action Coalition on Jan. 28, explained that a number of factors lead to street gangs, including poverty, racism, and drugs. But when it comes to helping those imbedded in the culture of the gangs, the faith community is especially powerful, he said.
“I didn’t say this during the meeting, but the most effective methods I’ve seen of transformation for individual gang members is the faith community,” Ramos said. “They’re really able to get in, as they say, and do the inside-out work that other methods are not able to do.”
Most of the founding members of the coalition credited the churches and programs they are involved with—including Revival Tabernacle Church, Victory Outreach, Fighting Back Santa Maria Valley, and others—as vital influences in their lives. Gallardo described the relationships formed between gang members as an “illusion,” and pointed to the bonds made in faith communities as the real connection he was looking for.
Another young reformer, Joseph Ramos, explained that young people could find friendship, mentorship, and stability at the church, but also through the dedicated individuals who stay consistently connected with troubled kids, whether they’re clergy or counselors.
“A lot of these kids, the dads walk out on them, the moms are gone, so there’s separation issues,” he said. “You want someone that you can depend on, count on, someone that’s anchored in your life, a focal point, a big old sturdy rock like the one they have out there in Morro Bay; it’s there, it’s always going to be there, and you can go to it anytime you want.”
Most organizers and representatives at the meeting, from law enforcement or the school district to counselors and faith leaders, all agreed that the problem can only get better when the variety of diverse organizations and citizens come together to help address the problem.
“I don’t see anyone pointing the finger; everyone wants to be proactive,” Mayor Alice Patino told the Sun. “They acknowledge the problems we have in the community, and they want to get in there and help it, help solve the problems. I am thrilled that we have so many people from so many different areas of the community willing to commit themselves to making Santa Maria a better place to live.”
The One Community Action Coalition’s next meeting is slated for Feb. 18 and will be open to the public. The organizers hope to offer another general presentation before breaking into groups to provide education for the sectors involved, including law enforcement, educators, counselors, faith leaders, and parents.
The problem won’t disappear overnight, Fuentes told the Sun after the Jan. 28 meeting. But when faced head on, it’s an issue that can be assuaged.
“There’s a lot of things that need to be done, and if we all put our heads together and get trained in the right areas, and we take that training and practice it, then we’ll be able to reach so many kids that people will be amazed at what can happen,” he said. “All I’m asking is for people to look at themselves, and look at what they can do.
“It’s going to take this community to come together, bond together,” he continued, “before you know it, we won’t have this violence like we have now.”
Contact Arts Editor Joe Payne at jpayne@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Feb 4-11, 2016.