Fed-Up Jr. High Youths Form an Anti-Gang Unit

The students at Audubon Junior High School have had enough.

They’ve had enough of being scared while walking to school, playing in their own yards or even sleeping near a window.

They’ve had enough of gangs.

Prompted by the death of 13-year-old classmate Jamee Finney, who, along with her 18-year-old neighbor Latonjyia Stover, were shot to death less than two blocks from their homes by gang members who mistakenly took them for sisters of a drug dealer, students have formed Concerned Students About Gangs, an organization to answer questions about street gangs and to get kids out of them.

Patterned after the Just Say No clubs and Students Against Drunk Drivers, the group will try to teach others “that gangs are a disease, just like alcoholism or drug addiction,” said Principal Gene McCallum. The club will meet on campus once a week and sponsor various activities to give youths alternatives to gang involvement, he added.

The students at Audubon, at 4120 11th Ave. in the Crenshaw district of southwest Los Angeles, were told of the new club this week at McCallum’s monthly assemblies.

In a message that echoed both the grief and anger that has gripped the school since the May 9 slaying, McCallum spoke to 575 of Finney’s fellow seventh-graders Wednesday.

“We have all lost someone through a terrible tragedy, but I do not want any one at this school to think Jamee Finney was just another individual,” he said. “She was a victim of mistaken identity. It could have been anyone of us.”

The group’s charter chapter will be headed by 15-year-old Sonya Holt, a ninth-grade student who wrote McCallum an unsigned letter the day after Finney’s death explaining how the girl’s death and an Oprah Winfrey show on gangs changed her life.

“I want to say I’m too young to die,” Holt wrote. “I have a life ahead of me (hopefully), and I want to take advantage of it. I want to die a gray-haired old lady, a great-grandmother, not a 15-year-old ninth-grader.”

Holt stood on stage with McCallum on Wednesday, urging her fellow students to look past the flashy cars and rolls of money made from drug sales to the streets where people are being killed almost daily. Holt said she isn’t comfortable with the publicity she’s getting from her letter and the resulting club, but she felt “it was something I had to do.”

“We have failed these kids as adults,” McCallum said. “We have not provided the atmosphere to keep them away from gangs, and now we need their input to solve this problem.”

The assembly struck a particularly deep chord with the 26 students in teacher George Marvin’s homeroom class. Three girls had gone to Finney’s funeral and all said she was a “sweet” and “funny” girl who may have sometimes dressed in gang “colors,” but never socialized with them.

“It’s still hard,” Tonya Everson, 12, said of her friend’s death. “I am starting to get over it, but when I go to sleep I still see her face.”

Finney is the second Audubon student to die from gang violence. In September, 1986, less than three months after graduating from Audubon, Ja Nai Marie Johnson was caught in cross-fire between rival gangs and killed.

Under McCallum’s five-year tenure, Audubon has instituted a strict dress code to prohibit gang members from wearing the red and blue “colors” affiliated with nearby Blood and Crips gangs. Security guards roam the campus with walkie-talkies and attendants stand at each gate, looking for red or blue hats, bandannas, shoelaces or even hair braids. If students do not hand over such items at the gate, they are sent home to change.

When inside, the students are constantly watched, either in the classroom or schoolyard, and campus visitors are prohibited without permission from the principal’s office.

“I don’t deny that we have gang members on this campus,” McCallum said, “but we don’t have gang problems. They are not allowed to show their colors.”

But once they are out the school gates, the realities of living in a Crenshaw district neighborhood infested with street hoodlums re-emerge.

About a third of the students in Marvin’s class complained of nightmares and most said their parents won’t let them play outside after school anymore.

“I think about dying a lot,” said 12-year-old John Holmes. “I can’t get to sleep at night because I always think a bullet will come through the window and kill me.”

“I’m fed up,” said 12-year-old La Rou Garnett, echoing the sentiments of all the seventh-graders interviewed. She said gangs have gone too far and need to be stopped, somehow.

McCallum and Holt hope their new organization will do just that. But even as it recruits its first members from the class where Finney once sat, the problem continues.

Less than 100 feet from where the assembly was held, gang members stood outside the Audubon’s chain-link fence, flashing hand-signs to students inside.