Gang Mom Page 2

  As her stature in the community increased, so did her influence. She formed a close relationship with the police department. Law enforcement looked to Mary as the one person who could break the spell that gangs cast over the city’s youth. She formed a close working relationship with Ric Raynor, a detective in the anti-gang unit. Eventually, the department appointed her to the newly formed Gang Prevention Task Force.

  Like the best evangelists, Mary could spellbind a crowd with the emotion behind her words, her commitment to keeping Eugene gang-free, her zeal in allowing the city’s children to keep their childhood pristine. And Mary vowed publicly to continue to pursue her cause, to break the hold of gangs in Eugene, to stop kids from joining them, as long as one breath remained in her body.

  As Lisa listened to Mary tell her story, she felt very moved and attended a subsequent meeting of the Gang Prevention Task Force that Mary was a part of. It was there that she met Aaron Iturra.

  “Hi, is Aaron there?” said Lisa into the phone. She was in the privacy of her room at home and took a quick toke of the joint in her free hand.

  “Uh, he’s busy right now, but if you want—”

  “No, it’s okay. Never mind,” Lisa interrupted, and hung up. Taking another toke, she made her second call.

  “He’s home,” she said. “I just talked to his sister.”

  “Good. Now call James.”

  The third call was to James “Jim” Elstad.

  “It’s a ‘go,’” she said.

  The wind came whistling in through the window of the back bedroom, where Janyce Iturra lay sleeping. Despite the weather, Janyce always slept with her windows open. She liked the feeling of fresh air around her. She worked hard during the day, as a receiving clerk at Fred Myers, a large department store. And since she usually went to work at four or five, she was in bed by nine.

  When the phone rang at ten, it woke her up. She heard her daughter Maya go out to get Aaron because the phone call was for him. After he came back in, she heard him say:

  “Well, who is it, Maya?”

  “I don’t know,” Maya answered. “It was just a girl. She hung up.”

  Janyce drifted back to sleep.

  Minutes later, seventeen-year-old “Crazy” Joe Brown stood in front of the Iturra home. The house was a panhandle, situated in back of another, the two connected by a narrow alley. The beauty of it was, you couldn’t see the panhandle house from the street. This type of dwelling was common in Eugene.

  Brown was a short kid who, at five-foot-six, weighed all of 140 pounds soaking wet. Dressed in black shirt and pants, with jet-black hair, scraggly mustache and goatee, he cased the joint. Quickly, he realized he had come too early. The house was lit up. People inside were still awake. He left and returned around midnight.

  This time, the house was dark. He tapped the glass of the living-room window several times just to be sure. When no one answered, he walked back to the far end of the alley where Jim Elstad crouched in the darkness.

  “Iturra’s asleep,” he whispered, the cool night air making his breath come out in a white plume.

  Elstad nodded and followed Brown back to the house. Both boys were dressed in the gang colors: blue bandannas over their faces and heads, blue bandannas covering their hands. Their gang leader had told Elstad and Brown that the open display of their gang colors was a symbol that someone was going to get killed. This was ritualized behavior. Dressing in this manner signified this as a Crip event, a Crip killing. Their gang leader had assured them that their “brother” Crips in Portland and Los Angeles would soon know about their work.

  They lifted the door of the garage, and found themselves standing before a bedroom that had been partitioned off by sheet rock in the rear. Brown pushed at the door of the makeshift room.

  Clothes, beer bottles, soda cans and empty pizza boxes were strewn all over the floor. On a small dresser made of cheap pressed wood were various types of shaving lotion and high school loose-leaf binders filled to bursting. There was also an old console color TV set.

  Two of the walls were decorated with posters celebrating Motley Crue, Menace II Society and Budweiser beer. There were pictures of two attractive young women dressed in low-cut outfits revealing their cleavage. The two other walls of the bedroom were covered in graffiti.

  And there on the bed was the target, Aaron Iturra, sleeping arm in arm with his girlfriend Carrie Barkley.

  Brown shook Aaron’s bare back. The teenager continued to slumber, but then Brown saw Iturra move his head a little bit, and start to get up. By then, Jim Elstad was at the door, holding a .45 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver in his right hand. Steadying it with his left, Elstad raised the weapon.

  Brown reached down to the girl’s purse, which sat on the floor amid the litter of the beer bottles and pizza cartons. He reached in and took out a pack of cigarettes, which he pocketed, then stood up and to the side.

  A few houses away, Jack and Cameron were visiting Angel. They were hanging out like they always did, smoking cigarettes, Angel doing so despite the fact that she was pregnant. They were talking about scams when they heard a loud pop.

  “F—!” Angel exclaimed.

  “Was that it?” Jack asked.

  “That was it!” Cameron confirmed.

  A neat, red hole had materialized in the back of Aaron Iturra’s head. Iturra slumped back down, the mattress suddenly turning a dark red. Carrie came awake instantly and screamed, “Help me, somebody come and help me.” Elstad and Brown turned and ran. Soon, they were back on the street and Elstad turned to Brown.

  “I can’t believe it. I shot that muthaf—er in the back of the head,” he said with a great big smile.

  Not a minute later, the boys came running in the door of the house that Jim shared with his sister Angel and their parents. Shaking violently, Jim Elstad declared, “I did it! I did it!”

  Angel looked at her brother and smiled.

  “Well, how do you feel?”

  All of the Crips in the room looked at Jim, who beamed proudly, like the kid who had sunk the big basket with regulation time gone.

  “I feel great! ’Cause you get such a thrill from it, you know?”

  “Yeah, you get a real thrill from it,” Joe Brown repeated.

  Joe opened his fist. There on his palm, for all to see, were four bullets and one spent shell.

  “Oh, God,” said Angel.

  They all looked at her. Water was seeping down her leg.

  “My God, it’s coming!” she screamed.

  “Somebody come and help us! Somebody come and help us!”

  Some sound, some feeling, something roused Janyce Iturra to consciousness. It was the TV, she thought, that was it. Darn you, Aaron, you left the TV on. He’d been watching TV in the living room and had fallen asleep on the couch. Which happened a lot.

  Janyce got up and went into the living room. Her first thought was “Oh, my God, it’s dark!” Then, as her sleep-shrouded mind cleared, she heard the plaintive cries again. “Somebody come and help us! Somebody come and help us!”

  Janyce’s adrenaline began to pump and she could feel her heart pounding in her chest as she ran through the living room and the kitchen into the garage area, to Aaron’s room. The door was open a crack and she just bashed right in.

  Carrie’s mouth froze in fear when she saw her. I scared the heck out of her, Janyce thought, seeing the pale, frightened expression on the young girl’s face.

  “Oh, God, it’s you!” said Carrie.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” Carrie muttered. For a moment, Carrie’s sad face and eyes looked even sadder, making her seem older than her twenty-two years. Janyce looked over at Aaron and suddenly, everything was blocked out. She heard nothing, saw nothing but the bloody picture in front of her.

  Her first-born son lay prone on the bed, a gash on the top of his head, on the upper part of the right eye. Oh, my God, somebody has bashed Aaron in the head, Janyce thought.

  “
Carrie, call 911.”

  Carrie ran out to the living room where the phone was, just as a commotion began. Janyce’s teenage daughter Tina came running into the bedroom.

  Seeing her brother, Tina asked anxiously, “What happened?”

  “Somebody has bashed Aaron on the head,” Janyce answered grimly and looked down. “You’re going to be okay, Aaron, you’re as strong as they come,” she said to the unconscious boy.

  Janyce glanced into the living room. Carrie stood motionless at the phone. She had gone into shock and couldn’t even dial 911.

  “Tina, go get me your phone,” Janyce ordered.

  Tina’s phone had a fifty-foot cord on it. She went back to her bedroom to drag it in. Janyce’s eyes trailed Tina down the hallway. Her other three kids were all standing at the back of the hallway screaming, talking, wondering what was happening.

  “Tina, get the damn phone!” Janyce shouted over and over until finally, Tina came back with it. “Get me some towels, get me some towels,” Janyce screamed.

  Though there wasn’t a lot of blood on Aaron’s face, she wanted to use the towels to put pressure on the head wound.

  “Hello, this is 911.”

  “Yes, I need, ugh, help, an ambulance,” Janyce shouted, continuing to apply pressure to the wound. She cradled Aaron in her arms with one hand, while trying to support him with the other. It was a struggle just to keep his 230-pound, six-foot-five body from sagging to the floor.

  The 911 operator, working out of Public Safety’s Central Lane County Communication Center, listened as Janyce described the head injury, then ordered Janyce to “get him on his back.” Aaron was on his side. Janyce’s hands were still preoccupied stemming the blood flow, so she used her legs to flip her son over. That’s when she saw the wound on the other side of his head. That made two, front and back, where someone smashed his head in, Janyce thought.

  “Keep the kids out of here! Keep them out of here!” she screamed at Tina. It was a strange scene, everyone running around wildly like Europeans at a soccer match, Aaron lying on the floor with a serious expression on his unblemished face while a pool of blood formed around his head in a sort of halo that seeped out farther and farther until it reached the vestibule of the doorway. Janyce picked up the phone. The 911 operator was still there.

  “Where are you?” the operator asked calmly.

  “We’re in a panhandle, we’re in a panhandle!” she kept repeating into the phone, and then gave the address. “You can’t see our house from the street, you know, but the address is out there,” Janyce continued, growing hysterical.

  Aaron’s head lolled to the side and Janyce picked it back up, trying to keep his airway open. Putting her other hand on the wall for balance, she continued to apply pressure to the head wounds. She paused for a second and listened. Thank God he was still breathing.

  “What’s your address?”

  On the other end of the line, Janyce could hear the operator typing into her computer.

  “1310 Rutledge Street.”

  “Okay, an ambulance is on the way.”

  It seemed like an eternity, but finally, Janyce heard the sounds of sirens approaching. The ambulance pulled into the driveway and she could hear a door being opened, a stretcher being wheeled out and in between, the talk of cops who had arrived on the scene and the static and crackle of their CB radios.

  The paramedics pushed Janyce out of the way, and began working on Aaron. Uniformed cops, prompted by the 911 report, flooded into the house. Once he was stabilized, the paramedics loaded Aaron onto the gurney. By then, Carrie was still in the living room in a state of shock, the kids were in the kitchen wondering what was going on and Janyce was ready to hop in the ambulance with Aaron. As she started out with her son, a plainclothes cop, who had recently arrived on the scene, stopped her.

  “But I’m going to the hospital with my son,” Janyce protested.

  “I don’t think so,” said the cop. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “What do you mean? That’s my son! Somebody bashed him in the head.”

  The cop looked sad. He looked around and saw the kids. “Why don’t you go into the kitchen with your kids?” he suggested in a gentle but firm tone. Somewhat confused, Janyce went into the kitchen, catching the barest of glances as Aaron’s ambulance sped off for Sacred Heart Hospital. The ambulance siren receded into the distance.

  What the hell am I waiting for? Janyce thought. Why are they making me wait?

  It seemed to Janyce that she was kept in the kitchen for a long time. There was a cop posted at every door of the house, and two or three were always with her in the kitchen. Sometimes, the cops thought they heard some noise outside, and one of them always went to check it out. Each time they came back and said, “Nothing,” sounding disappointed.

  What was actually happening, though Janyce didn’t know it at the time, was that the cops were securing the crime scene and hoping that whoever had hurt Aaron might be coming back for something they had left. Such things did happen, though rarely.

  Janyce looked down at her hands and suddenly discovered that they were covered with Aaron’s blood. In all the excitement, she had forgotten about that. She went over to the sink to wash it off. She turned the faucet on, fiddled with the hot and cold water, and was just about to plunge her hands in when one of the cops yelled, “Stop!”

  No one, least of all police officers, wanted someone to be killed just so that they could solve the case. But they were prone to boredom just as much as the next guy. A year could go by in law enforcement without anything really interesting happening. Oh, there’d be an occasional homicide, a crime of passion where a husband killed his wife for cheating on him, or vice versa, nothing some rookie couldn’t solve, and then Kaboom! There’d be a case that tried everything in you and you were right back in it again.

  In the Eugene Department of Public Safety, there were four trial teams that worked homicides. Jim Michaud was a trial team leader. In short, that meant that when his number was punched, he had a murder to solve. So when his beeper awoke Michaud out of a sound sleep, the best he could hope for was a case really worth getting out of a warm, comfortable bed for.

  He pulled his lanky body up, reached for the beeper, looked at the number on the LCD, picked up the phone beside the bed and dialed. After a moment, someone answered.

  “Michaud here,” he said in a flat, nasal twang. Listening, he nodded a few times. Next to him, Paula slept soundly. She had been through this before.

  “Yes, I know where it is,” he said into the receiver, then hung up.

  In the decade prior to the Iturra murder, some believed that the power and ability of the Eugene Police Department to do their jobs had been compromised by a string of city managers who had de-emphasized the department’s role in maintaining public safety. Perhaps it was the liberal leanings of the town that had brought the changes on. Whatever it was, cops on the street no longer felt that they had the support of their bosses.

  Lately, the Chief had been floating a new plan around. The idea was to take experienced investigators like Michaud and rotate them back to uniform. This way, everybody got a chance to move up the ranks, and seasoned veterans got to go out on the street again. Never mind that inexperienced officers would just muck up a crime scene. Michaud had found that logic had nothing to do with the decisions the brass made.

  By the time Michaud arrived at the crime scene in his 1993 Ford Taurus, it was threatening rain. Still, Michaud never wore a rain coat or carried an umbrella. He figured it was bad luck.

  Jim Michaud strode through the crowd of cops and medical personnel who were milling around out in front of the house. With his tall, rangy good looks and confident stride, he looked like a professional athlete, instead of what he really was: a senior detective in the Violent Crimes Squad of the Eugene Department of Public Safety.

  “Hi, Steve,” he said to Steve Skelton, the D.A.’s man.

  “Jim,” Skelton nodded.

  Skelton, a
n assistant district attorney, was there to provide support if the detectives had any legal questions regarding removal of evidence, interviewing subjects or anything else that might have a legal bearing on the case.

  “Hey, Les, what have we got?” Detective Michaud asked his partner Les Rainey.

  “A kid was shot. Execution style. One to the head. Looks like a forty-five,” said the detective, consulting his notebook. “He’s not expected to make it through the night. Mother’s in the kitchen. She’s pretty upset about the gunpowder test.”

  Before he went in to talk to the mother, Michaud entered the garage bedroom and looked at the crime scene. There was a pool of blood on the bed where the victim was shot down, with spattering on the walls. A crime-scene photographer stood off to the side taking shots of the room from various angles.

  It used to be that the Eugene Police Department sent their crime-scene shots out to local Pacific Photo for developing. Lately, a police lab had been established to do the work, which in Michaud’s opinion was unfortunate, because Pacific Photo had done a better job.

  “Have you found the bullet?” Michaud asked one of the crime-scene technicians who was examining the blood spatter on the walls.

  “Not yet,” he muttered.

  “Keep looking.”

  He found Janyce seated in the kitchen. After Michaud introduced himself, she peppered him with questions.

  Why did they keep her at the house? Why did they stop her from visiting her son? And why did she have to take that test? Michaud shot a look at the other cops at the scene, who wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  “Oh, my God, you don’t know yet,” Michaud muttered.

  “What?”

  He took her outside to his car and sat her down.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but Aaron was shot …”

  “What are you talking about?” Janyce asked innocently, almost defensively. “He had a gash over his eye.”