Two blocks from where 14-year-old Cheryl Green was shot to death a year ago stands a symbol of the Harbor Gateway neighborhood where she died.
The fourplex on 204th Street is one of many apartment buildings erected in this small and crowded neighborhood during the last 20 years. The building has a new coat of yellow paint, yet faintly visible beneath its surface is the graffiti that a year ago covered the building.
It was the work of 204th Street, a Latino gang that terrorized the neighborhood and was known to attack blacks. An upstairs unit in the complex was its unofficial headquarters, police say.
On Dec. 15, 2006, two members allegedly gunned down Cheryl as she stood talking with friends. Police say the youth accused of shooting the black teen had used a gun acquired at the fourplex.
A year later, building and neighborhood improvements are evident. Members of 204th Street no longer hang out at the apartment complex. Many are in prison or jail. Two await trial on murder and hate-crime charges in Cheryl's death.
Following her killing, intense police pressure on the gang "drove them underground," said Dan Robbins, the Los Angeles Police Department officer who investigated 204th Street. "We'd go for days without seeing a gang member."
But police and residents say the gang lurks like the graffiti beneath the yellow paint, ready to reemerge when public resources are directed elsewhere.
"It's like a weed," said Charlene Lovett, Green's mother, who has since moved. "If you don't get it from the ground and uproot it, it's going to regrow."
Uprooting it will be difficult. During the last 20 years, private developers and Los Angeles' declining industrial economy weakened this once-strong neighborhood, leaving it poorer, cramped, transient and more fertile turf for gang activity. The lesson from the Cheryl Green case is that "we need to think long and hard about our land-use decisions" and how they help gangs flourish, City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo said. "What that geography looks like is important."
Few local gang crimes in recent years have generated as much media attention as Cheryl's killing.
Within weeks of the fatal shooting, FBI Director Robert Mueller, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, LAPD Chief William J. Bratton, L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca and other officials stood at the Del Amo Market that the 204th Street gang had declared off-limits to blacks. They vowed to crack down on gang violence.
