No escape from gang influence

WAPATO -- The boy who grew up in the gang house used to lay his head in his mother's lap and tell her his dreams. They were always changing.

"I'll become a boxer," he'd say sometimes.

(But she'd be so sad to watch somebody punch her littlest boy.)

"Maybe I'll be a wrestler, then."

(Won't happen. You're too skinny.)

"What if I become a singer?"

(With that voice? You sound like a howling dog.)

"I know," he said finally, a few weeks before he died. "I'll become a thief."

His mother grew tense, thinking about her oldest boy, the one locked up in California. Then a familiar tone crept into her son's voice.

"Yep, a thief with a degree. I hear lawyers make good money."

Sixteen-year-old Ricardo Cabrera was a smart aleck and a mama's boy who drew comics, listened to hip-hop and played basketball with the neighborhood kids at night.

No one, including authorities, says he was a gang member.

But his brothers and friends are.

And on the evening of Nov. 12, somebody with a bone to pick with somebody else in Ricky's home -- or so some family members believe -- shot him as he walked outside with a friend.

"I wouldn't wish this pain on anybody. Not on the mothers of the people who did this. Not on anybody," said Maria Cabrera, 50, who still dials her dead son's cell number to hear his voice mail recording. "I don't want this to happen again. More violence won't bring him back to me."

No arrests have been made in the eight weeks since Ricky's death. Investigators say they have leads on suspects, but not enough information to arrest anybody.

His death capped a string of homicides in Yakima County in 2008 that police say were gang-related. Of the 18 people killed in the county last year, half were teens.

Ricky was one of them.

Months before his death, bullets from two drive-by shootings pierced through rooms in the Cabreras' single-story house on North Track Road.

"I guess they call this a gang house because of the people who hang around here," said Ricky's brother, Christian Cabrera, 22. "Most of my friends are gang members."

Christian is, too. He joined at age 14, following in his two brothers' footsteps. There's Miguel, 30, who's serving a sentence at California's High Desert State Penitentiary for assault with a deadly weapon. And Alejandro, 27, with a felony record that includes a 2002 firearms conviction. Christian has no felony convictions.

Alejandro Cabrera says he can't give up the "gangster" way of life, even though he now has three children of his own. Even though his little brother is dead.

"I don't know how to explain it to you," Alejandro said one evening in his parents' home, where framed photos on the walls remind him of a smiling, brown-skinned boy. "I don't know how to explain it to myself."

Ricky's siblings didn't want him to join a gang.

"I'd always hound him, tell him, 'I'm not going to let you throw your life away,'" said his sister, Veronica Guizar, 23, a counselor for young people with substance abuse problems. "He'd say, 'I'm not a loser. What, do you think I'm stupid?'"

Nobody got hurt during the two drive-bys that happened last summer. But after the first one -- after watching his panicked little brother run into the house, collapse on a bed and pat his body for wounds that weren't there -- Christian bought a gun.

The next time was different.

"I saw the gun. I heard a shot. I returned fire," Christian said.

He doesn't know if he hit anybody. He wonders if that's what led to Ricky's death.

"If they had problems with me, why didn't they ..." He trailed off. "My little brother was just going to the store that day."

Ricky was walking to the Crossroad Market about 6:30 p.m. with a friend, Andrés Silva-Corona, 16. Clerks there remember Ricky as a quiet regular who'd buy a 99-cent bag of hot Cheetos and a fountain drink, then leave.

He didn't make it to the store that night.

The pair had barely walked two houses down when a green, four-door car slowed beside them, Silva-Corona said. Somebody yelled something he says he didn't understand, but when a gun came out of a window he understood. He'd been shot at before. Silva-Corona ran, assuming Ricky was behind him.

There were gunshots. Then he heard his friend shout: "I got shot! I got shot!"

Silva-Corona went back to Ricky. He dragged his friend home.

Ricky's shoulder was hit. The bullet ruptured an artery. He bled to death at Toppenish Community Hospital.

The county coroner determined Ricky had marijuana in his system when he died. His family won't say if he smoked pot. Instead, his sister recounts how she would trick Ricky into going to the clinic to take drug tests, tests that always came back negative.

Wapato High School administrators declined to comment for this story out of respect to the Cabrera family.

Ricky's grades ranged from B's to F's. The sophomore often failed math, but did well in English and science. He talked about joining the Army after high school and later attending Gonzaga University, mostly because he liked its basketball team.

Teachers often gave him detention for mouthing off in class, said his girlfriend, 16-year-old Maria Alvarez.

He had no criminal record, but police officers sometimes stopped him as he walked outside and asked that he empty his pockets, Alvarez said.

Ricky couldn't avoid knowing gang members, said Guizar, his sister. They were an inescapable part of his home environment.

"He had no choice about who he grew up with or around," she said. "They say 'shooting' and it's like he had to be a gang member. If they knew Ricky they'd know that wasn't the truth."

Investigators with the Yakima County Sheriff's Office believe Ricky participated in gang activities, but don't know if he was a member. It's a complicated distinction, said Stew Graham, chief of detectives.

The sheriff's office is handling the case at the request of the Wapato Police Department, which lacks the manpower to investigate homicides.

"We don't have enough officers to hit the streets," said Wapato's police chief, Richard Sanchez, who expressed sympathy for Ricky's death.

Sanchez said he has no indication that Ricky was a gang member.

"I know his family, that his brothers are involved," he said. "But I'm not going to say anything about the family. It's bad enough they lost one of their children. A victim is a victim."

In the days after the shooting, the community braced for reprisals. Sanchez connected a "spike" in gang activity at the high school to Ricky's death, and said some parents were in denial about their children's gang involvement.

"The families have to wake up and understand that they know that their kids are involved in gang activity," Sanchez said at that time.

During Ricky's funeral Mass, friends from school and the neighborhood packed St. Peter Claver Catholic Church. Officers from multiple law enforcement agencies patrolled the area. Reporters stood by, too, just in case gang unrest flared.

None did.

"Our family is not stupid to not understand what they were trying to say," Guizar said of the media and police. "They made a mockery of our grief."

Everybody spoiled Ricky, the youngest of five children. His siblings gave him money to take out his girlfriend. They bought him name-brand clothes, which he'd carefully wash and hang over the kitchen chairs to dry. On the evening Ricky died, Christian was in Yakima buying his brother a desktop computer.

"I'd tell him, 'I'll get you anything. You just don't be messing up in school,'" said Christian, who couldn't afford college after graduating with a 3.2 grade-point average from Wapato High School. "I wanted everything for him better than what I had."

Growing up, the older siblings wore hand-me-downs and helped their parents in the fields. Maria and Lorenzo Cabrera, immigrants from Mexico, have picked and packed fruit in the Yakima Valley for nearly three decades.

Lorenzo, 54, came to the United States as a teenager looking for adventure and the American Dream. His was a dream that went bad.

Before meeting Maria at a Los Angeles car wash, Lorenzo had a son with another woman. He worked, he drank -- now he drinks to erase the memories, he says -- and he sold drugs. Sometimes he'd score big, but the money slipped through his fingers.

"He would spend his money somewhere else instead of the bills. But he did his time," said Christian, who in a way became a father to Ricky when in 2001 their father was arrested and jailed for dealing cocaine.

During their father's 15-month absence, the older Cabrera siblings helped their mom keep up with mortgage payments by working everywhere from a slaughterhouse to a McDonald's to a grocery store.

"We all had to do something to help the family," Guizar said.

Those who study gangs say one way members can get out of one is to leave town. Ricky's brothers know this. The oldest, Miguel, moved to California for that reason.

The other brothers won't leave. Wapato is home.

Ricky loved their house, with its peeling tiles, dark hallways and a front door that's never locked.

The place is a refuge of sorts for friends who have nowhere else to go. Recent immigrants. Entire families. Other people's children.

It's in Maria's nature to take people in. She was an orphan who, from the age of 8, raised her two siblings in Mexico. She won't close the door to anybody, especially if they're her children's friends.

"When they're here, it's as if a little part of Ricky is still here," she said.

There is a new visitor at the Cabrera house, a nun from Wapato's Marie Rose House. Ever since Ricky's death, Sister Mary Ellen Robinson has stopped by most evenings to offer emotional support to Ricky's mother.

She reflects on the code of silence among gang members, their families and friends -- especially when it comes to talking with police.

"The silence is a lot more complicated than I first thought," she said. "What I feel like I have learned is how inescapably natural it is to protect one's own."

In this neighborhood, people have to lie sometimes in order to avoid gang retaliation, said Amanda Green, an 18-year-old from Wapato.

She says she knows this from experience, and grows quiet.

Then Green remembers the boy with the vivid imagination who'd make up stories with her when she was a little girl.

"Ricky didn't have a chance to tell his own story," she said.

Ricky made friends easily, wrestled with his brothers and devoured his sister's chicken enchiladas. He was a happy boy but practically obsessed with the idea of dying. He romanticized the deaths of his rap idols and wrote his own lyrics about the world around him.

"What if you die?" he'd ask his friend, Silva-Corona. "What if I die?"

They promised they wouldn't shed a tear at each others' funerals.

It was a promise Ricky's friend couldn't keep.

* Melissa Sánchez can be reached at 577-7675 or msanchez@yakimaherald.com.