South Los Angeles

There was a logjam at the door of a makeshift schoolhouse one recent morning, because everyone was being scanned with a metal detector. There was a reason for that. Of the 50 students filing in for class, 45 were once gang members -- in at least 30 rival gangs. It was a swaggering crowd, with shaved heads and baggy pants, gold chains draped around thick necks. Many still used their street names: Brick. Q Ball. The students sat on metal folding chairs.

Los Angeles Police Sgt. Alex Vargas sprinted across the grass to the front of an apartment. He leaned ever so gently against the door. "It's open," he said, and his breath quickened. He locked eyes with another officer who was standing across the stoop, gun held tight against his thigh. "I'm going in," Vargas said.

Los Angeles City Hall officials are preparing to sever ties with one of the more high-profile gang intervention organizations in South L.A., a decision the agency head decried as "an injustice" -- even dangerous because of the agency's success in reducing violence between rival gangs. The city's Gang Reduction & Youth Development office plans to end its contract with Unity T.W.O. Inc. at the end of the month.

A young mother who allegedly shot her two boys Saturday -- killing her 5-year-old and critically wounding her 1 1/2 -year-old -- shouted, "I've wasted my life!" from her balcony and threatened to kill herself before she was arrested, police and neighbors said. LaTonya Dixon, 25, called 911 about 8:30 a.m. Saturday and told the dispatcher that she had killed her children. When officers arrived at the three-unit apartment complex in the 7200 block of South Gramercy Place in South Los Angeles, the woman was standing on a second-floor balcony waving a handgun.

Tony Peterson was 15 when he planted a pine sapling outside of his mother's home in South Los Angeles. For years he watched it grow, but then life took over. Peterson found a girlfriend, got married and moved out. As for the tree, it grew on its own, Peterson said. Over four decades, the pine grew into a towering "y," its thick trunk stretching and leaning toward homes in the 4900 block of Wadsworth Avenue. Its roots had burst through the ground, exposing themselves. Neighbors, including the now 58-year-old Peterson, feared the giant tree would one day fall.

It began, as mortal disputes sometimes do in South Los Angeles, over a girl. On one side were the Main Street Crips, one of the more muscular gangs in the neighborhood. Main Streeters commanded respect, if only because they had a bit of money to throw around, even their own small record label. On the other side were the Hoover Criminals. The Hoovers were big, with turf that stretched from Vernon Avenue down past Century Boulevard and into "the hundreds," as the streets are known locally.

Top Los Angeles law enforcement and elected officials Tuesday acknowledged a recent rise in the number of killings in South Los Angeles and announced plans to bolster anti-gang activity in the area. Speaking at a news conference at the Los Angeles Police Department's 77th Street station, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Police Chief William J. Bratton said a task force consisting of officers from the LAPD, California Highway Patrol, the mayor's gang-intervention program and other agencies would be formed to focus on the swath of the city south of downtown.

Ronald Perkins and his neighbors were nearly outnumbered by the consultants and architects who showed up at the Jordan Downs community center. For three hours, they listened as a procession of planners depicted their home as an "island of poverty," and dissected it by "landscape character and typologies." But something puzzled Perkins as he studied the new homes that would replace their decrepit apartments. So when the tenants were asked for their opinions, he raised his hand: "How come I don't see no bars on the windows?"

Fourteen years ago, Reggie Cole was sentenced to life without parole for a murder during a botched robbery in South Los Angeles. This week, as Cole's sister, niece and 76-year-old stepfather looked on in a Compton courtroom, prosecutors dismissed the murder charge against him. But Cole didn't walk out a free man. He remains incarcerated for killing an inmate nine years ago while he was at Calipatria State Prison in Imperial County.

The plan to transform a vacant lot used as an illegal dumping ground into a youth center and soccer field for low-income residents in South Los Angeles seemed like a winner. The Los Angeles City Council allocated a $2.4-million community development block grant to the nonprofit Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles to buy the lot and develop the property in a community long bereft of recreational opportunities. Eight years later, with no youth center or permanent soccer field having been built, the Los Angeles Unified School District has seized control of the blighted six-acre site, with plans for an elementary school and soccer field.