Leon described Jesus as a quiet guy who didn't talk much about his family. The one thing he did talk about was how unhappy he was with college. Jesus talked about moving back to Mexico and working in the fields, she said. He told his cousins in Houston that he might move there and be a state trooper.
"I always felt like he wasn't sure what he wanted to do," Leon said.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday May 30, 2003 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 38 words Type of Material: Correction
Green card Marines -- A photo caption accompanying an article on Marine Lance Cpl. Jesus A. Gonzalez in Wednesday's California section incorrectly stated that Marines were standing at attention at Gonzalez's grave. They were standing at parade rest.
She said Jesus draped a Mexican flag across the wall of his campus dorm. He urged Leon, a second-generation Mexican American, to learn Spanish, and he played his favorite Mexican rock music for her.
Jesus liked drinking beer and tequila, Leon recalled. He got a tattoo and they danced to hip-hop at clubs in Riverside and San Bernardino. "He was a really good dancer," she says.
During his second quarter, Jesus told his parents he was tired of studying, tired of lectures.
He told them the secret he had kept for weeks: The boy who had once rushed out to watch soldiers march past had grown up and joined the Marines.
Staff Sgt. Ramon Arredondo remembers Jesus was the only UC Riverside student he signed up while working in the Indio recruiting office. Jesus confided that he needed to try a different path. The young man didn't strike Arredondo as a typical gung-ho fighter, the recruiter said.
"He just wanted a little more direction," Arredondo recalled during a telephone interview from Okinawa, Japan. "The school wasn't going as fast or as easy as he thought.... He wasn't leaving school to leave it forever. He knew he was coming back to it."
He spoke proudly of his mother, Arredondo said, and how she had worked with Cesar Chavez.
Jesus went to boot camp in April 1999 and was assigned to the 1st Tank Battalion at the Twentynine Palms base. He seemed as happy as he had ever been, relatives said. His sister Carla remembers him boasting of how he could break down a gun.
He met Ivonne Avalos. She was the 15-year-old sister of the wife of his Marine buddy Rene Leon. Ivonne was a petite, quiet girl who went to Kearny High School in San Diego. Like Jesus, she was a Mexican immigrant. Like Jesus' parents, her parents had divorced when she was young.
"We just connected," Ivonne said.
She said Jesus got tired of the Marines. He liked riding tanks, but he didn't like taking orders.
Leon said Jesus talked about "how much common sense our superiors lacked.... He didn't like people that didn't think about things."
