Watts Ca

IN his first year as principal of Jordan High School in Watts, Stephen Strachan ordered 743 suspensions -- 600 more than the principal the year before -- to punish students for fighting, defying authority, defacing the campus and disrupting classes. His second year, he suspended students 596 times. Strachan lost 30 teachers -- almost one-third of his staff -- to other schools and different jobs at the end of that first year, and 16 more the next.

It is my mother's memory, not mine. Consequently, it is a recollection that doesn't feel observed so much as absorbed. But I was there, and so, too, my father: the three of us launching ourselves into a day of optimistic house-hunting. It is 1964; I am nearly 2; "New Baby" is on the way.

It was hot, but that wasn't all that was making Michael Wainwright sweat. "I just pray this goes smooth," Wainwright said, making his way toward a crowd of boisterous teens gathered outside the sweltering gym at the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts. He was waylaid before he reached the rec center door. "Hey, Wainwright, you got a job for me, right?" shouted a shirtless young man, swaggering over and planting himself in Wainwright's path.

You could tell the students were nervous at the start of the science competition Wednesday between 112th Street Elementary School in Watts and Wilder's Preparatory Academy in Inglewood. "Name the two kinds of organisms on Earth," one fourth-grader from 112th was asked. "Animals and plants," the student answered correctly. "Which one are you?" "I am a plant."

Jazmani Busby has learned things in her nine years that no child should have to learn. She has learned to drop to the floor at the sound of a gunshot. She has learned what an AK-47 looks like. She has learned that, all too often, the people around her die young. Jazmani, a lifelong resident of the Nickerson Gardens housing project in Watts, doesn't like to talk about these things.

Jordan Downs is a close-knit community where parking lots double as playgrounds for swarms of rambunctious kids, grown men call older women "auntie," and neighbors trust one another enough to wander in and out of each other's unlocked homes.

Residents at the Colden Oaks apartment complex in Watts are used to the sight of police cars in their neighborhood. But a crime that occurred Saturday afternoon shocked even longtime residents hardened by years of gang violence. Near a grassy common area inside the complex's gates, a 14-year-old boy allegedly sexually assaulted an 11-year-old boy at knifepoint. The boy's friend also was attacked but managed to escape.

Los Angeles police officers were investigating whether road rage was a factor in a five-vehicle accident Saturday in Watts that sent seven people to a hospital, but none with life-threatening injuries. The accident was reported at 2:08 p.m. at South Central Avenue and 114th Street, said Brian Humphrey, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies working to end a deadly racial gang war in an unincorporated neighborhood just north of Watts have made 230 felony arrests and seized 130 weapons since April, Sheriff Lee Baca announced Friday. The law enforcement push was made possible by a 57-member task force assembled to saturate a 3 1/2 -square-mile area between Florence Avenue and Firestone Boulevard where gang shootings had left more than 40 people dead and 200 wounded during an 18-month period.

The Watts Towers and a nearby arts center will soon have visitor parking again: On Wednesday workers were in the process of turning a vacant lot into a temporary gravel parking area to address employee and neighborhood concerns about safety and street congestion. The regular parking lot was bulldozed two weeks ago as work began on a $4.7-million youth arts center on the city-operated site -- with no parking alternative then in place for construction expected to last up to 18 months. L.A.