Out of Jail, But Not Danger

Just three months out of prison, Miguel Rafael Gomez was determined to turn his life around.

A former gang member from East Los Angeles, he joined Homeboy Industries, an organization whose motto is “nothing stops a bullet like a job,” and began working toward a better future.

But early this morning, as he and two fellow workers were painting over gang graffiti on a Boyle Heights storefront, Gomez, 35, was shot and killed.

Police are searching for one, possibly two, suspects. They don’t believe Gomez’s former gang affiliations sparked the shooting. Instead, they said the shooters may have been enraged because Gomez was removing their gang symbols.

“It was an opportunistic moment. This happened at 5:30 in the morning. They had a couple of minutes of darkness still,” said Los Angeles Police Det. Carey Ricard. “I have nothing to suggest that [Gomez] was doing something wrong.”

Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn called it a “real tragedy.”

“Young men should not be at risk for their lives while they are participating in an anti-gang program,” he said.

Gomez, a former gang member, served 10 years in a state prison. Soon after being released, he joined a rehabilitation program at Homeboy Industries in East Los Angeles.

“His first step was to say, ‘That’s it for me, I don’t want to go back to prison,’” said the organization’s founder, Father Gregory Boyle, who had known Gomez for almost 20 years. “It was magnificent that he walked through these doors. At the end of his life, he was able to tell his mother, ‘I am not how I used to be.’”

Homeboy Industries has been removing graffiti from the Boyle Heights neighborhood for four years, said Boyle. This was the first incident of violence targeting workers while on the job.