Son’s Act of Defiance Becomes a Lesson : Family: Child’s gesture symbolizes the problems a South L.A. mother faces daily.

Even as he leans out the back seat window of a moving car, the little boy’s piercing gaze is impossible to ignore.

He is glaring straight into the camera, his tiny face stern and furious. There is defiance in the boy’s expression, but the boldest message is in his gesture: The middle finger of his left hand is thrust into the air.

To many people who saw that photo in The Times several weeks ago, the unnamed boy was a chilling symbol of the deeply held rage that engulfed Los Angeles after the not guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating case. To Davette Demery, 26, the photo was a poignant warning: A single mother can never, ever let down her guard.

The boy in the photo is Demery’s 6-year-old son, Reginald LeRoy Gardner II, whom she had entrusted to a relative the day the photograph was taken. Like so many parents in Los Angeles, Demery fights a daily battle to keep her child out of trouble. She sets strict rules and tries to show him the consequences of his actions.

But there are times, the photo showed her, when a parent’s best protective efforts just are not enough. Those times can test a mother, Demery said, making her feel helpless when she needs to be strong. Determined not to be defeated, she resolved to turn the embarrassing image into a lesson for herself and her only child.

First, she called The Times photographer who captured Reginald’s “bad finger” on film, thanked her for “acting as my eyes” and asked for an enlarged copy of the photo to hang on the wall. Then, she wrote a letter to The Times.

“I don’t know where to start only because this confusion started before I was born,” her letter began. There was much more to Reginald than the photograph, she said. Maybe if newspaper readers could see that, they might better understand what made him lash out, aiming his upraised finger at the police.

“How do you explain a 6-year-old giving the police officers the bird--to millions of people?” she asked, sitting on a worn couch in the 10th Avenue apartment she and Reginald share with her grandfather. “He’s not the type of kid who makes gestures like that. But at the same time, I know he meant it--it was in him.”

“My son made a statement,” she said. “And I’m going to complete it.”

In the South Los Angeles apartment complex where Reginald lives, the broken front gate does not lock, the swimming pool has been filled in and the small, grassy front yard is surrounded by a six-foot fence. He plays soccer in a concrete courtyard, kicking a bottle cap instead of a ball.

Before the riots, his mother bought him a new, red bunk bed. But Reginald, frightened that bullets could crash through the window, still sleeps in a sleeping bag on his bedroom floor.

Today, much about Reginald’s world has changed. Arsonists burned to the ground the Korean-owned grocery at 63rd Street and Crenshaw Boulevard. Reginald once did odd jobs there, working in exchange for toys. When he saw the store’s smoldering remains, he told his mother: “I don’t have a job anymore.”

Demery and her son moved to the apartment complex a year ago, following Demery’s 44-year-old mother, JoAnn Baldwin, who lived upstairs. From the beginning, it was a frightening place; the first night Baldwin moved in, a gang member pulled a gun on her male companion, setting him free only after he swore he was not affiliated with a rival gang.

But the apartment is all Demery could afford.

Soon after she moved in, Demery was made the tenant manager of the complex. She collects rent from other tenants, and in exchange, she and Reginald occupy the two-bedroom, $650-per-month apartment for free.

She would prefer to work outside the home, but despite her work experience--as a bus driver, hostess and cashier--her job search has yielded no offers. Groceries, clothing and utilities quickly consume the $650 in public assistance Demery receives each month. Often, when Reginald asks for ice cream, she has to tell him no.

Demery knows she is more fortunate than most. Her rent is free. Her family is nearby. And she is in touch with Reginald’s father, who has pitched in when needed to make sure his son does not go wanting.

But Demery wishes things were better. The lack of grassy, open space has taken a toll on her child--Reginald has new scars on his elbows and knees from always playing on concrete.

More troubling is her worry that Reginald may have a learning problem--perhaps dyslexia. He often confuses B’s for D’s and seems to have trouble focusing his attention, she said. If she had the money, she would buy the first-grader a set of recorded cassettes that teach children phonics.

“But it’s 300-something dollars for the whole system,” she said matter-of-factly, without a hint of self-pity. “That’s a long way down the road for me.”

Demery is adamant that Reginald never use his family’s poverty as an excuse to do wrong. On the first day of violence and looting, Demery bought Reginald a new red toy car to make other children’s stolen booty seem less attractive. Weeks later, she continued to quiz her son about his reactions to the riots.

“You sure you didn’t want a candy bar out of the store?” she asked recently.

“I got my own candy,” he said softly.

Demery nodded. “How do you get your candy?”

“With my money,” he said.

“That’s right,” she said.

When Reginald told her that a friend gave him a looted jacket, Demery immediately zeroed in. “Where’s that jacket at?” she asked sharply, softening only when Reginald said it remained at the home of his friend.

“That’s where it’ll stay, too,” Demery said. “Don’t become a looter.”

Demery is very careful about the men she sees. She does not date much; lately, she has not gone out at all. But when she does, she rarely brings her dates home to meet Reginald.

“I’m very picky--I have to know them before I will even introduce them,” she said. “Being friends and socializing is one thing. But for them to influence your child. . . .”

Despite her precautions, there are a handful of young men in the neighborhood who do influence her son. In the absence of his father, Reginald seeks them out. More than a few are gang members.

One gang member taught Reginald how to play soccer. Lately, the man, whose name is Bob, has begun calling the boy “Li’l Bob.” “If I put Reginald out,” Demery said, “this man would take him in. It’s hard.”

Demery tries to counter what she knows is powerful pressure to associate with gangs. She will not allow her son to have a toy gun--not even a water pistol. To illustrate the dangers of gang life, Demery takes her son to the closet. “Do you think you could live in jail in a room this size?” she asks him.

Recently, Reginald asked if Bob could be his godfather. Demery said no. But when Bob invited Reginald home to meet his mother, Demery let her son go.

“I don’t know if that was a bad thing to do. I don’t know if it was good. But I did it,” she said.

She cannot make all his choices for him. “I feel that even though you put things into them, you still have to let them make somewhat of a decision. He knows I do not appreciate people in gangs.”

Will that be enough to keep him from falling in with a gang? Demery struggles with that question every day, just as she did the day William (Turtle) Shannon died.

Police said Shannon, 17, was shot to death in February when he and an armed accomplice tried to rob a small watch shop in West Los Angeles. He was Reginald’s friend--”the first gang member that ever took to us,” said Demery. Outside her front door, gang grafitti pays Shannon tribute: “RIP Turtle.”

At the memorial service, Reginald sat on the lap of Shannon’s mother and told her he would kill the shopkeeper who shot her son.

Demery recalls the look on Reginald’s face. “He didn’t cry. He said: ‘He killed my friend.’ And I said: ‘You’re not Superman. Bullets don’t bounce off you.’ ”

Last month on Demery’s birthday, Reginald rose early, and before leaving for school borrowed five candles from a neighbor. He poked them into a cake and surprised his mother as she fried bacon in the kitchen. She squeezed him tight.

“Do you want to wish the same wish?” she asked him.

“Wish what you want to wish for,” he whispered in her ear.

“I wish that we stay together forever,” she said. “Is that a good wish?”

Reginald nodded. Together, they blew out the candles.

Before the verdicts, Reginald always said he wanted to be a police officer. Part of the appeal, Demery laughingly admits, was the spiffy uniform and the squad car.

“He likes fast cars,” she said. She has tried to tell Reginald that Los Angeles police officers are not especially popular among many people in the black community. “He doesn’t care.”

Last year, on his sixth birthday, Reginald invited two neighborhood officers to his party. When they were late, he saved them ice cream cones. Demery says her son developed a crush on another officer, a blonde woman who came to investigate after a 16-year-old boy hit Reginald.

“As soon as he sees an officer, he starts blushing,” she said. “He really looks up to them.”

That feeling endured even after Reginald watched police arrest some young men he knew.

“He asked me then, ‘Mom, why are they taking them to jail? They were just sitting down.’ I said, ‘Reginald, they were trespassing.’ ”

The King beating was harder to explain. Over and over again, Reginald saw the videotape of the four white police officers kicking and swinging their batons. “To him, they were beating this man regardless of what he had done,” Demery said.

But still his faith in police was unshaken. When Reginald saw another man being beaten on television--a white trucker named Reginald O. Denny--he expected the police to come to the man’s aid.

“He asked me: ‘Where were all the police at? Why weren’t they stopping to help the people?’ ” Demery said. “I didn’t answer the question because I couldn’t. I said: ‘Reggie, I don’t know the reason why.’ ”

The other day, Reginald was asked what he wants to be when he grows up. His answer: a fireman.

Since the riots, Demery has told her son that if he is ever in the newspaper again, she wants it to be for “something great.”

“Can I show them your letter?” Reginald asked Demery the other day. “The one for Mother’s Day?”

He ran to her bedroom to fetch a pink floral card that he bought with money he earned crushing aluminum cans and taking out the trash.

“For a Very Special Mother,” the printed message read. “Wishing you a day filled with love from beginning to end. Because you’re more than my mother--you are also my friend.”

Inside, in careful but crooked handwriting, Reginald wrote: “I love you. I am sorry for being in the newspaper. Very very sorry.”

When he displayed it, Reginald’s big eyes beamed and his cheeks cracked into dimples. It was not the face in the newspaper photograph. In fact, Demery says she has only seen that face a few times before.

When she opened her newspaper, Demery remembered a basketball game, when another boy tripped Reginald, causing him a painful scrape on the knee. Reginald was humiliated, but too proud for tears.

“That was exactly the look on his face: ‘I’m not going to cry about it,’ ” she said. The last time Reginald saw his father, in February, Demery saw the face again. “Leaving his dad--that is definitely the face.”

But Demery does not dwell on the difficulties in Reginald’s life. He must deal with those, just like anyone, she says. And as he does so, she wants him to be his own man.

“I don’t believe in flowing with the crowd. I explained that to him and told him if he wanted the best in life he had to work hard for a better lifestyle,” she wrote in her letter to The Times. There are many pitfalls, many pressures, she added later. “But I don’t believe you have to get caught up. I believe that you can actually be your own self.”

When she thinks about the future, she imagines Reginald all grown up, with a family of his own.

“He’ll tell his kids: ‘I see everything you do. You want me to prove it to you? Go ask your grandmother,’ ” Demery imagines. If they ask, she knows how she will answer: by showing them a photograph of a serious little boy with his finger in the air.