Requiem for a Statistic

Joey Luna was one of those in the barrio who could have made it. His friends thought so, his teachers thought so and his parents thought so.

He was studying history, talking about taking computer classes and preparing to transfer to another school.

Joey was trying to break old ties, to leave the area, to start again.

Only a year before, he had “courted out” of a street gang, a ritual of departure that requires a member to be beaten before he can abandon his membership.

The beating was so severe, Joey told a teacher later, he thought they would kill him.

It was an eternity of minutes before he could rise painfully, bruised and bloodied, and walk away.

But at least, he said, he was done with that part of his life and could go on from there. At 15, Joey Luna had decided there was something better in the world than gangs, something grander, something. . . .

Oct. 25. Wednesday. Joey wanted to call his girlfriend, but his mother was on the phone. He borrowed money and left the house to use a phone booth across the street.

It was a little after 8 in the evening. The autumn heat had drained from the day and a breeze was cooling South-Central Los Angeles. A quiet lay over Figueroa Street.

Then there were shots.

Joey’s little brother, 12-year-old Frankie Luna, heard them first and ran outside. In a moment he was back in the house screaming, “They shot Joey!”

Joey never had a chance. There were seven bullets in him. He died that night, and they buried him in statistics.

Jose Guadalupe Luna, born Jan. 3, 1973, had become gang victim No. 234 this year in the City of Angels. There were 196 similar murders in the same period of 1988.

His killing was a mistake. A war rages between the 9-0s and the Sou-los in South-Central L.A. Joey had belonged to neither of them but lived in their battle zone. His old gang, the Villas, was farther west.

Police believe he had been caught in the cross-fire of that war. A witness said three youths about his age simply walked up to him and shot him. There are no suspects.

I heard of the killing through a letter from Barbara Nagy, a teacher at Bethune Junior High. Joey was a student at Fremont High, but had learned to confide in her when he was at Bethune.

Joey was like a son to her, she wrote, and his death was a terrible loss to everyone. But there had been no mention of his murder in any newspaper, except as a statistic.

He was No. 234.

“I would like for him to have some kind of notice, some kind of memorial,” the letter continued. “So many innocent people have died, too many of them kids. For each death, there is sorrow. . . .”

I talked to her later. “Do something,” she pleaded. “Joey was one of the good ones. Only a few days before he was killed, he called and said his request for a transfer to Garfield High had been approved.

“He was trying. God, he was trying . . . .”

Candles burn in a shrine for Joey in the living room of the Luna home. It is a small stucco house near the corner of 91st and Figueroa streets. There are heavy mesh screens on the windows.

The family rents the house for $550 a month, more than half of what the father, Francisco Luna, earns each month as a handyman. It is without electricity and in need of repairs.

The shrine consists of a small plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, pictures of Joey, and three glass-encased votive candles.

“We didn’t talk much,” the father was saying, “but when we did, I would tell him to work hard in school, to learn something, to be better than me.”

He is a big-bellied man of 54. Around him sat the rest of the family: Joey’s mother, Guadalupe, three sisters and one brother. Another sister, the one closest to Joey, didn’t want to be there.

“Jose was no angel,” the father said. “He spent three months in juvenile hall for running away and got into trouble at school for smoking and painting graffiti.”

Luna paused to light a cigarette and to organize his thoughts. “But he was turning around, you know? He was changing. After he got out of jail he said to me he would never go back. He said it was a lousy place to be. . . .”

Everyone liked Joey. Dozens of students and teachers attended his funeral. Gang members did the next best thing. They stayed away.

Barbara Nagy asked me to write about Joey so everyone would know that even the good ones aren’t spared when gunfire is heard on the streets.

The last line of her letter said it all. “Please God,” she wrote, “may I never have to attend the funeral of another child.”

Joey Luna, gang victim 234. Let that be his epitaph.