Yamileth Fuentes constantly worried about her son Michael's education.
As the mother of a child with learning disabilities, she made sure he didn't get overlooked in school. She fretted when his math worksheets weren't challenging enough, or when his spelling slipped.
The energetic 42-year-old Metro bus driver wasn't afraid to fight on her son's behalf. She enlisted the help of clergymen, bureaucrats and an army of lawyers in the battle to get Michael a proper education. Once, she even stopped her bus to confront the mayor when she spotted him giving a news conference on a downtown street corner.
She believed, as countless other parents do, that her child should be given every opportunity to succeed.
Even if he was sitting behind bars, accused of murder.
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Yamileth was 21 when she gave birth to Michael Garcia, her third child. He was a boy who loved to dance, was scared of thunder and didn't like being alone.
When he was still very young, Yamileth began noticing oddities in the way Michael spoke. He had trouble finding the right words and sounds, and his sentences were a jumble. Kids teased him about it. In elementary school, he was diagnosed with a speech and language impairment and an auditory processing disorder.
Michael never liked the special education label. It's just that you have a different way of learning, Yamileth told him. But the attention seemed to make him feel inadequate. He grew frustrated and started cutting class.
As adolescence kicked in, Michael slipped more and more out of control, becoming obsessed with girls and hanging out with friends Yamileth didn't know. But with her, he remained a devoted son.
He waited at bus stops after school, carrying Chinese takeout so that Yamileth, who worked 10-hour shifts without meal breaks, could get a bite to eat at the end of her route. He would quietly sit in the back of the bus for hours as streams of people got on and off, his shoulders swaying along with the bumps on the road. When they got home, he would take off her shoes and rub her feet, telling her every detail about his day.
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In early 2006, Yamileth got a call from a detective looking for Michael.
He wanted to interview Michael about an incident the teen had witnessed, the detective told her. She didn't think much of it. Michael was picked up that afternoon.
Around 10 that night, her phone rang again. This time, the detective told her Michael was under arrest.
Authorities charged him with murder and attempted murder for two shootings in South Los Angeles.
In the first, a car-to-car shooting left a man dead and a woman wounded. Michael was accused of being in the gunman's car.
Six days later, gunshots were again ringing out in the streets when a frightened-looking teenager ran into a couple's backyard. A woman in the yard with her baby started screaming when she saw him. Her husband came running out.
"Let me in, they shot me," pleaded the teen, whom the husband and wife later identified as Michael.
When the husband tried to shove him out of the yard, Michael yelled at another teenager to shoot and kill the man, the couple testified. The other teen fired twice, grazing the man's buttocks, leading to the attempted murder charge.
Casings indicated the same gun was used in both incidents. Authorities believed the shootings were related to the Barrio Mojados gang. Michael, they said, was a member.
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Yamileth quickly became a regular at Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall in Sylmar, where she visited her son every weekend. She often still wore her blue bus driver's uniform and carried a lawn chair for the lengthy wait in the sun.
Michael was housed in the high security "compound," with an extra set of fences. Facing transfer to adult court, the teens in the compound were deemed too dangerous to come into contact with other juveniles, much less go to school with them.
Michael told his mother that classes inside the compound consisted of a couple of hours a day at the steel picnic tables where a teacher would pass out worksheets. She asked him to fold away one of the sheets to show her what he was learning. She was appalled to see single-digit addition for her 15-year-old son, who was in ninth grade before his arrest.
Yamileth started talking to other mothers in the visiting line, and with them formed a parent-teacher association for the compound. Probation officers took to calling Yamileth and two others who were always speaking up the "three amigas."
The parents, with chaplain Javier Stauring, met with attorneys at the Youth Law Center who demanded changes in the educational conditions at the compound. The county built modular classrooms and a secured path from the compound to the school facility to allow the youths to receive full days of instruction.
Michael started attending special education classes staffed by a teacher and an aide. Yamileth saw the changes in the longer, more coherent sentences he was writing in his letters.
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