Residents Clean Up a Mean Street

VENTURA —  It was a night in September, and Billy Zara lay lifeless on the pavement outside his apartment in the west Ventura neighborhood known as the Avenue.

He had been beaten by eight members and associates of a gang that had terrorized the neighborhood for decades, police said.

Even before the fatal beating, residents had been fighting back against the social pathologies that afflicted this working-class neighborhood of small bungalows and the industrial remains of an oil business that abandoned the area in the ‘80s.

They had scored some major successes. The city installed brighter street lighting and aggressively enforced building code violations. New businesses were beginning to move in.

Now, police and prosecutors were determined to give them one more dramatic victory. The arrest of the eight suspects marked the largest single bust of its kind in county history. And residents who had been fighting to rebuild their neighborhood began to feel safer.

“We got a bad rap,” said Mike Del Dosso, a longtime resident who used to steer clear of drug dealers and vagrants when he took his nightly walks. “And at one time that was deserved. But that’s changed.”

City officials say the change is evident in crime statistics. Once the third-ranking area of the city in terms of calls for service, it dropped to sixth out of 159 reporting districts last year.

“Crime has gone down immensely in five years,” said Rochelle Margolin, an associate with the city’s economic development department. “The perception of the rest of the city is that it’s a crime-ridden area. And that’s not true.”

Today, residents say, you can see once unthinkable signs of recovery: children walking to and from school, the windows of once-vacant storefronts flickering to life, families strolling at night past graffiti-free buildings. Much remains to be done, but activists think they at last have a shot at reviving one of the city’s oldest and most neglected neighborhoods.

Most residents of the area, which stretches two miles along both sides of Ventura Avenue, credit a drive-by shooting six years ago for the neighborhood’s rebirth. The shooting left bullet holes in the windows of several occupied homes at the corner of West Harrison Avenue and Olive Street. It was one thing for criminals to shoot and kill each other, but this tore at the fabric of the community itself.

“It was a wake-up call to our community that if we didn’t come out of our homes we were in a world of hurt,” said Sharon Troll, one of a group of neighborhood activists who banded together after the shooting.

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They formed the Westside Community Council in 1994 to work for change. Three years later, the community council rallied city officials to pursue a $1.5-million federal grant to fund a gang suppression program.

The grant pays for eight Ventura police officers, two county probation officers, a deputy district attorney and programs at the Ventura Unified School District and the Boys & Girls Club.

The community council has also instituted its own safety patrol. On weekend nights, volunteers drive through the neighborhood, armed only with police scanners and walkie-talkies.

They look for trouble, but they don’t get out of their cars or confront anyone. Instead, they call police. Or they just drive by several times. Sometimes, their presence is enough to disperse a group of loitering kids, said Del Dosso, one of the drivers.

Besides serving as eyes and ears for overburdened police, the citizens patrol has unexpectedly become a conduit for residents reluctant to contact police themselves. These residents now know they can stop in at the community council’s North Olive Street office, a small storefront in a strip mall, and chat with Troll or another volunteer.

“People are just reluctant to call the police,” Del Dosso said. “It’s not fear. They just don’t want to get involved.”

But most of the time these days “you don’t come across crime when you’re on patrol,” said Del Dosso, a 26-year Avenue resident. “Most nights, we’re bored.”

Nowhere is the ongoing revival of the neighborhood more evident than at the Westpark Community Center at the end of West Harrison Avenue. A half mile from where Zara was killed, it was still gang turf.

“They roved around,” said Ventura City Councilman Brian Brennan, a former Avenue resident. “I think they always thought the whole area was theirs.”

When Amy Crittenden took over three years ago as director of the community center and started calling police on loitering gang members, she found her name in graffiti on the bathroom walls. In the crude language of the streets, that was a clear threat. When her car was vandalized, she worried more.

“I’m not going to lie,” said the 33-year-old woman. “I was watching my back.”

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Today, the spray-painted monikers that advertised the center as gang territory are gone. Now, breathless 10-year-olds dominate the handball courts. Now, eight security cameras guard the building and a panic alarm connects Crittenden directly to the police.

“Now, a statement has been made,” she said. “The statement is: ‘We’re watching you.’ ”

The difference has been remarkable, she said.

“All these families are walking in going, ‘Wow. This place is great. I haven’t been here in years,’ ” Crittenden said. “I no longer hear kids talking about gang activity. All I hear is kids being kids.”

Then came the beating of Zara, and the arrests. Police boast that they have chilled gang activity along the Avenue, at least for now. For weeks after the arrests, the gang members who routinely crowded the neighborhood driveways and street corners were noticeably absent.

“I know if I live in an area,” said Ventura Police Chief Mike Tracy, “and a lot of gang members are arrested, I know that will have to have an impact on my community. So I’m not surprised if they are relieved.”

At Guitterez’s, a popular lunch standtwo blocks from where Zara was killed, counter clerk Tina Lunsford, 32, has noticed the change. Gang members aren’t a problem in the neighborhood unless they are confronted.

“Back when I was growing up, it was bad,” she said. “[But now] they only bother you if you bother them. But I wouldn’t go out of my way to go around them.”

Things are also much quieter on East Warner Street at the north end of Ventura, where Zara lived and died. When he was alive, his place was a hangout for neighbors and high school friends who would smoke and drink and listen to music and take turns getting back rubs from him.

No one gathers in the concrete courtyard of Zara’s building anymore. After the killing, everyone scattered. Zara’s roommate disappeared and lost touch with his old friends, they say.

“He took a few of his things and told us we could have the rest,” said a friend, Heather White.

A single mother who lived in the freshly-painted house next door with her two children sold out to Jerry Figureida, 27, and his wife, Ann.

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The couple moved in in November, but didn’t know about Zara’s killing until recently. Figureida, a Ventura native, said the news won’t drive him away. He wants to fix up the house and start a backyard vegetable garden.

Next-door neighbor David Spier, a 20-year resident of Warner Street, said he was happy to see the exodus of his young neighbors and the thugs across the street.

“The neighborhood has changed dramatically since then,” he said.

The 51-year-old house builder had grown tired of the all-night parties and his own volatile confrontations with the suspected gang members.

Their music was often so loud, he said, that it drowned out the music he played inside his own house. Spier said he faced off with the group numerous times. His neighbors thought he was crazy, but Spier isn’t one to be bullied.

“That’s the first question that everybody asks me: ‘Aren’t you afraid?’ ” he said. “I’m a Vietnam vet. I have a different idea of fear than most people.”

Now the house once occupied by the suspected gang members who have been arrested in connection with the killing is home to John Mooney, 26, a recovering drug addict who spent his youth in an Oxnard gang. He said the images of Zara’s brutal death so close to his new home kept him awake at night until he bought a Native American talisman.

“I was pretty spooked by it,” said Mooney. “Then I bought a dream catcher.”

On the Friday night in September that Zara, 18, was beaten to death, the citizens patrol was not on the streets. The frequent parties on Zara’s street were unknown to them, Troll said. But Zara’s death hasn’t reignited old fears. It bolstered the resolve of neighborhood activists to fight gang violence.

“[Zara’s killing] says my neighborhood is not without violence, but we are a less violent neighborhood than many,” Troll said. “And we won’t stop until this work is done.”

Times staff writer Tina Dirmann contributed to this report.