Bullet Ends Years of Peace in Church Bid to Stop Gangs

It was supposed to be a friendly basketball game aimed at luring gang members off the street and into the neutral territory of an Inglewood church hall. Instead, it turned into a bitter brawl between members of rival gangs that left a teen-ager in a coma with a bullet wound in his head.

Solomon Bradford, a 17-year-old junior at Hillcrest High School in Inglewood, went to the First Church of God on Tuesday night to play ball with his pals at a weekly sports program for gang members and other street kids. The shooting ended several years of nonviolence and camaraderie at the games.

The Rev. Herbert Tiller, who rents the church gym for an anti-gang program he calls the Dare to Love Ministry, said he felt the tension among the 20 young men from Los Angeles and Inglewood as the teams surveyed each other before Tuesday’s game began.

Tiller, an associate pastor at Southwestern Church of God in Los Angeles, said the nervousness was caused by some newcomers at the game. Tiller said both groups agreed not to fight after he talked with a few of the young men. A few minutes after the game began, however, a fistfight erupted on the sidelines and Tiller broke it up. Another fight began soon afterward, and Tiller said he then called the game off and ordered everyone out.

He said he escorted one group to the door and watched the young men head for the gate of the church. He then escorted the second group out of the church and discovered that the first gang had returned. Tiller said he and Bradford were among those who were attempting to separate the two sides as a third fight began at about 9:20 p.m.

“Fighting broke out,” Tiller recalled. “Then the shot went off. I was on the ground tussling with three boys. Right behind my head, I heard the shot. I didn’t know anyone was hit until I saw the blood.”

Inglewood police are still sorting out the details of the shooting that sent Bradford to nearby Centinela Hospital Medical Center, where he was listed in critical but stable condition after surgery to remove a bullet from his brain.

Police said one of the men pulled out a handgun during the fight and began firing. The groups dispersed after the shooting and bystanders took the wounded teen-ager to the hospital, police said. No arrest has been made, police said.

Sgt. Harold Moret said he was surprised when he heard about a gang-related shooting in a churchyard during a program aimed at helping gang members.

“The fact that two groups of young men can have a fight that escalates into a shooting is not surprising. It could happen anywhere,” he said. “But we’re talking about a quiet residential neighborhood, and the church is trying to help these guys like themselves. The fact that violence would happen is just one of those things. It’s unfortunate.”

The Rev. Leroy Walker, a minister at the First Church of God, was working in the church when he heard the gunfire. He said that the shooting has scared a lot of people but that the church has no plans to stop the anti-gang program from using the gym.

“Someone has to help these kids,” Walker said. “Rev. Tiller stood 10 feet tall in my eyes when he forced those men to leave the churchyard (after the shooting). I saw him hollering and screaming for these kids to leave as he was protecting this boy’s body with his.”

Tiller and Bradford’s mother, Shirley Surratt, are attempting to look at Tuesday’s tragedy in a positive light.

“I believe that God is going to make him get up out of that bed,” Surratt said in an interview Thursday as she visited her son in the hospital. “There’s no anger in me. I’m convinced in my heart that this had to happen. I’ve been praying for God to save my son. God is dealing with him now up in that room.”

She said that her son was not a gang member but that “he hung around with the wrong crowd.”

“Basically, Solomon is a good kid,” his mother said. “He did well in school for many years. In the past year, his grades have been up and down.”

Surratt said she has sympathy for gang members, including whomever shot her son.

“These kids are crying out for something,” she said. “A lot of them have never been loved before. A gang is really a family. These boys share their homes, their clothes, their food. They love each other.”

Tiller said the shooting may add to the difficulty he has already faced in getting a grass-roots anti-gang movement off the ground. Tiller began his anti-gang work in 1986 after he began watching “a lot of young men get shot in the streets.” He worked at the county-sponsored Youth Gang Services for a year, then began his Dare to Love Ministry in the fall of 1988. He said the search for funding and facilities is a constant struggle for programs that work with gangs.

“I have to continue to work with the gang members,” Tiller said. “We have to do it in spite of the fact that someone might get shot. My program will go on. Anything that’s worth anything is going to have risks.”