The End of a Life on the Edge : Youth: Abel Silva was a budding Police Explorer with a talent for athletics; he was also a gang member with a rap sheet. In the wake of his beating death, some who supported him remain unsure where his life was really headed.

When news of Abel Silva’s death reached the police officer who thought he had rescued the 17-year-old from the streets, his first thought was to ask: “How was the kid dressed?”

No answer would bring Abel back to life, but Officer Frank DiPaola had to know anyway: Was Abel “dressed down”--in gang garb--when he was chased and stabbed by a mob of youths along the beach in Malibu? Had he flashed gang signals at the young toughs? Had he in any way provoked the attack?

No, DiPaola was told by investigating detectives--Abel Silva appeared to have been an innocent victim of a marauding gang.

“I was relieved,” DiPaola explained later. “If it was gang attire, we blew it. It would have spoiled everything”--everything being the months he and another LAPD cop, Kevin Scroggins, had spent trying to turn Silva from a gangbanger into a helper, a soon-to-be member of the Police Explorers, complete with a spiffy blue uniform--and no more gang tattoos.

Abel’s tattoos were being removed in a series of laser treatments donated by a Beverly Hills dermatologist, who had questions of her own when she learned of his murder: Why hadn’t they finished the job quicker? Why hadn’t they blotted out the last telltale symbols of Los Angeles’ largest gang, etched on the neck and hand of Abel when he was a boy.

“He may have been saved,” a distraught Dr. Adrianna Scheibner theorized, “if the tattoos were all gone and he wouldn’t have been recognized.”

Abel’s parents also had a question, but a more simple one: Could he be buried in his Explorers uniform?

So it was that Abel was in law enforcement blue as he lay in an open coffin for the funeral in Hollywood. Then, as the parents took the body to Mexico for burial last week, Los Angeles police and Los Angeles County sheriff’s detectives continued to search for the killers who not only snuffed out a life, but put a tragic end to a battle over a soul.

For that’s what it had been, a tug of war over Abel Silva that pitted the powerful pull of the streets against . . . well, there were those cops, the doctor, his probation officer, his school. All pulling for the kid, hope against hope.

“I think the gang members were winning the battle,” Abel’s probation officer said the other day, still depressed by a relapse near the end, when the teen-ager flaked out for a while, cutting classes again and missing meetings.

But Officer Scroggins, who recruited Silva into the Police Explorers, would have none of that.

“My philosophy,” he said, “is that when a kid comes up and says, ‘I want to be a part of your group,’ then we have won his soul. He’s thought about it and decided he wanted to change. In that sense, we won. We showed him six months of the other side of life.”

The Kid

The first record of Abel Silva in Los Angeles dates to 1985, when he was enrolled in local schools. He was 8.

His parents had moved the family from Guadalajara, and found the jobs awaiting immigrants: his mother ironing clothes for a Downtown Laundromat, his father as a janitor at a clothing factory.

Outsiders who got to know the family later would comment on how sad it was that such hard-working people saw their eldest son sucked into the local gang.

The 18th Street gang has been a force for decades, supplied first by generations of Mexican-American youths, then newcomers from Central America. Starting like most gangs in a concentrated area--the neighborhoods south of Downtown--18th Street grew like none other in the 1980s and dispersed citywide until it claimed thousands of members. It became notorious for collecting “rent” from street vendors and shaking down drug dealers for a piece of their take.

Abel began running with the gang almost as soon as he hit his teen years, all but abandoning school and beginning a rap sheet. In August, 1993, he and three companions surrounded a man at a bus stop, took his hat and, when “he tried to get it back,” one law enforcement official said, took his necklace, as well.

When Abel was picked up last spring as a passenger in a stolen car, police decided the slender suspect, with a wisp of a mustache, might be a candidate for an experimental program for “at risk” youths. Despite his record, he seemed polite, almost shy, when confronted one-on-one. He also had a hobby outside gang life, boxing, and idolized the clean-cut Olympic champ Oscar de la Hoya.

So he was offered a chance to “work off” the offense at the LAPD’s Central Division, performing community service such as graffiti removal and attending group counseling sessions in which officers try “tough love” to steer kids away from crime.

Many refuse to participate, wanting nothing to do with the cops. But Silva accepted.

When a reporter asked him why in April, he said, “My mom was crying too many times.”

The Cops

At 45, Frank DiPaola has “done it all and seen it all” in 20 years with the LAPD, and does not pretend there is any easy answer to youth crime. “We get a lot of failures,” he said of the Central Area Juvenile Impact Program, launched in 1990. “They don’t all of a sudden become angels.”

At a session witnessed by a reporter in April, DiPaola confronted a group that included Abel Silva, ordering one of the youths to take off a boot--then snatching it away. “How does that make you feel?” he taunted the kid.

It wasn’t subtle, but the point was made: How did his victims feel?

There’s also a flip side to such confrontations. The youths are offered trips to museums or car shows or scenic areas, or classes in theater or dance. And near the end of the program, each group is visited by Scroggins, a 6-foot-3 Marine lieutenant who joined the LAPD four years ago and now heads the 40-member Explorer unit. He describes his program’s opportunity to work as a police helper and even get five weeks training at the Police Academy.

Again, the pitch is not subtle: Let this become your gang. Let cops become your homeboys.

“They have to say to me, ‘I want to do it,’ ” Scroggins said. “By them reaching out, I usually grab them.”

Of 136 youths put through DiPaola’s program this year, only about five or six have raised their hands and been accepted into the Explorers. Abel was one.

He got the highest score on the physical fitness test given applicants, 96 out of 100, and whizzed around the obstacle course in 31 seconds--far quicker than most regular police recruits. He was not scheduled to begin Academy classes until March, but was in preliminary training at the police station, with Saturday meetings.

He also got the uniform with a breast pocket patch that looks like a badge. “When he put on the uniform, he was so good-looking,” said his sister Rose, 21.

Abel would wear it while walking from their apartment to the station, showing new colors, so to speak. He began turning up evenings, asking to go on ride-alongs. “We couldn’t get rid of him,” DiPaola said.

Soon they trusted him to answer phones at the station. They helped him enroll in an independent study schooling program. And, on weekends, Scroggins would take the Explorer recruits into the field.

“We worked different details,” Scroggins recalled. “The Hollywood Bowl, the L.A. Marathon . . . traffic control, security for Little Tokyo, Chinatown.”

The helpers were given flashlights and radios. On May 1, Abel used his to alert police officials when a Cinco de Mayo celebration on Broadway turned into a bottle-throwing melee and officers were surrounded--by gang members.

“When I got new gang members (in the program) who turned off to me,” DiPaola said. “I’d say, ‘Abel, go talk to this kid in Spanish and set his mind right.’ ”

The others had only to look at Abel to know he’d been one of them. Then DiPaola decided that if the kid was going to make a permanent turnaround, those tattoos would have to go.

The Doctor

In most of her practice, Scheibner is pure Beverly Hills. A dermatologist specializing in using lasers to remove blemishes, she spends much of her time eliminating scars left by face lifts and breast jobs. She also has written a book on inner and outer beauty, and has a line of skin products with an 800 number reminding callers to “radiate the amber glow.”

But the Czechoslovakia native “old enough to remember the lack of freedom” also treats, for free, those imprisoned not by a political system but “their own skin.” Her Brave Hearts Foundation (“because they have to be brave to do this”) sees about 100 gang members a month in Los Angeles, Orange or Ventura counties.

DiPaola brought Silva to her office over the summer to begin treatments to remove 18th Street markings on his neck and between his thumb and index finger where “every time you shake someone’s hand, it’s there,” Scheibner said.

“These children put themselves in self-imposed prisons,” she said.

It amazed her how they could be so destructive in groups, then, “when you look at them individually, they’re like little birds with broken wings. They don’t want to be stuck in the violence.”

Abel was a classic case, she said. “He had an air of peace about him.”

Murder at the Beach

The Sheriff’s Department took the 911 call just after midnight Oct. 4, reporting a commotion off Pacific Coast Highway.

Homicide Detective John Gentzvein said Abel, a friend and two girls had come to Malibu to enjoy the beach, only to have eight or nine young men (“a couple of carloads of gangsters,” Scroggins called them) approach with baseball bats and knives.

Any hint of Abel’s 18th Street ties posed a danger because the gang is hated by others. But he knew enough, when asked where he was from, to say, “nowhere,” DiPaola said. “If 10 people are surrounding you, no matter how macho or stupid, I don’t think you’re going to say anything.”

As witnesses described the scene, Abel suddenly ran and the group gave chase. The obstacle course champ fled across Pacific Coast Highway, dodging traffic, but was caught on a hill on the other side.

The attackers had fled by the time squad cars arrived. Abel died as he reached the hospital.

Assigned to investigate, Gentzvein was surprised when LAPD guys started calling to check on his progress and offering help. The sheriff’s detective soon realized “they have a personal interest.”

DiPaola came in on a vacation day to help the family make final arrangements. He got crime victim restitution funds to pay for a coffin, then personally carried Abel’s Explorer uniform to the mortuary.

The 50 people at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church on Oct. 8 included other Explorers and eight LAPD police officers, in tears.

“Police,” DiPaola noted, “don’t normally go to gang members’ funerals.”

The Legacy

Though the cops wanted the public to know of Abel’s short life, they worried about “the slant” any report would take. The message, DiPaola insisted, was “the positive thing the cops are doing” and how one kid went from gangs to goodness--as if the story would be spoiled if each and every one of the elements did not meet the Hollywood ideal.

Which, of course, they did not.

Abel’s probation officer, Carolyn Pryor, was the first to hint that the battle for his soul was far from won. “A young man may say he wants to change,” she said.

She had grown concerned over the summer when one of Abel’s relatives was released from juvenile camp. Two weeks later, Abel showed up for his regular probation interview in baggy shorts and a belt embossed with a number: 18. Pryor did not need it spelled out.

“He was dressed down,” she said. “He also stopped going to school.”

After Abel stopped showing up for meetings with her, Pryor visited the family’s South-Central apartment--and found them gone. Neighbors said there had been a drive-by shooting after the young relative moved back in. The Silvas had fled to Hollywood.

Pryor knew what the cops were trying to do with Abel, but thought another tack might be wise now, to write up a probation violation and “get Abel back in custody, so he could be gotten off the street.”

The officers who had all but adopted the teen-ager later acknowledged that they too had not seen him for the last month. Scroggins had also paid a call to his home, looking for him.

“Was the kid 99.99% pure? No,” DiPaola said. “He probably did go back and forth into the abyss.

“I think he walked a fine line between two opposing worlds. One day, he walked into their territory, the next he walked into ours.”

DiPaola worried that he could have done more. “If the kid could have moved in with (us) a couple of months. . . .”

So on which side was Abel at the end?

It’s impossible to say for sure. But officials at Hollywood High School reported that he had begun attending classes there in September, a step up from the home-study program. And he told his sisters he was going to return to Explorer meetings the “next Saturday”--the day that instead saw his funeral.

“Sad, huh? It goes on and on and on,” said Hollywood High Principal Jeanne Hon. “Breaks your heart.”

Her heart went out not only to the boy, but to those who had tried to help him--and who perhaps were too hard on themselves now.

“Sometimes you think you have failed, but you’re the 18th person who has talked with a kid. It may be that it’s the 23rd person who really gets to him,” Hon said.

“He came back. He was trying,” she said of Abel. “Maybe he just didn’t live long enough to turn.”

Staff writers Robert Lopez and Vicki Torres contributed to this story.