The War on La Familia
Before the night of April 3, 2007, Fernando Guzman and Ramona Moreno were unfamiliar with the sound of gunfire. At first, they thought they had heard an explosion.
The young couple had spent the evening at the hospital, where Ramona’s sister had given birth that day. They had left their 2-year-old daughter, Yelena, at her grandparents’ house — a tidy yellow-and-green home on North 17th Street in Kansas City, Kansas. Yelena was an affectionate child who earned the nickname “La Choky” because of her tendency to hug her dad, Fernando, tightly around his neck. She met her parents at the door when they got back a little after 9:30 p.m.
Ramona, a soft-spoken 23-year-old with a porcelain face and blond-streaked hair, sat on the couch in the living room. She watched Yelena as she played on the floor in front of the entertainment center, munching on a tortilla. The protective mother asked the toddler to stop playing with a glass statue in the shape of praying hands that her grandma kept on the shelf.
Then came the noise. The frightened family heard a series of loud blasts coming from the entryway. They didn’t know it was a hail of bullets from a gunman standing at their front gate.
Ramona started screaming. Fernando ran from the kitchen. Yelena crumpled to the ground.
Carlos Moreno, Ramona’s brother, had been watching TV in his bedroom. The 21-year-old recognized the sound of shotgun fire. He darted out of his room. He saw his niece holding her head in the entryway. He crawled to retrieve her. Keeping low, he pulled Yelena to a back room, leaving a trail of blood smeared on the hardwood floor.
Fernando grabbed his daughter from Carlos. He didn’t realize she was hurt until his right arm started to feel hot and wet. Under her long black hair, Yelena had been struck just below her left ear. The wound bled onto her father’s shoulder. She was still breathing and her eyes were open, but she didn’t respond when her parents spoke to her.
Ramona called 911, but she was terrified that the paramedics wouldn’t come in time. She wanted to drive to the hospital herself. “But — I don’t know why — I couldn’t touch Yelena,” she says. “I was afraid she would die in my arms.”
They waited in a bedroom in the back of the house, listening for the sound of sirens. Ramona couldn’t understand why her brother, Carlos, wouldn’t give her a hug.
“I’m sorry,” Carlos said. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault.”
When the ambulance arrived, Fernando rushed outside with Yelena in his arms. The front porch was sprinkled with shattered glass. As he passed through the chain-link fence at the end of the yard, he didn’t notice the five red-tipped shotgun shells partly hidden in the foliage near the sidewalk. Ramona jumped in the back of the ambulance and asked Yelena to stay with her.
Once the ambulance took off toward Children’s Mercy Hospital, Fernando cornered his brother-in-law. He knew his in-laws didn’t have problems with anybody. He knew his family had no reason to be targeted.
“Who did this, man?” Fernando asked.
“The FLs,” Carlos said.
The FLs were members of a gang called Familia Loca. Carlos was part of rival gang Florencia 13. For nearly a decade, Kansas City, Kansas, police have been monitoring street robberies and drive-by shootings connected to Hispanic gangs. But in 2007, the violence between F13 and Familia Loca escalated. Their battles weren’t confined to the streets but aimed at each other’s homes.
And last April, an innocent 2-year-old got caught in the crossfire.
[page]
Ramona and Fernando met through one of Ramona’s friends from Wyandotte High School. She had come to Kansas City in 1996, when her parents moved from Mexico to find work. Fernando arrived in the Midwest three years later, after growing up in Los Angeles.
They dated for a year before they settled down together. When their first child was born, Fernando suggested the name Yelena. He got the name from a character in the Vin Diesel movie xXx.
The small family lived in a square, white house with brown paint trimming the windows. Beyond the fence that outlined their mostly barren backyard, the headstones of the Mt. Calvary Catholic Cemetery framed a view of Interstate 635. They both worked as janitors. Ramona says they felt safe in a community surrounded by so many family members.
Yelena was an energetic child who sang and danced, even when there was no music. She watched sports with her dad but loved wearing make-up and clomping around in her mom’s high heels. She craved being the center of attention; at her second birthday party, she wore a bright-pink dress to complement the Strawberry Shortcake theme.
Ramona says the family didn’t have friends who were victims of violence. She had concerns about her brother, though. Carlos had a job at Epic Landscaping, but he’d had some trouble with police. In August 2006, he was charged with fleeing the scene of an accident and possession of marijuana. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation.
Carlos was evasive or got angry when Ramona asked whether he was in a gang. A few months before their home was attacked, Ramona took a disposable camera to Wal-Mart to have the film developed. She thought the camera was hers, but it belonged to Carlos. The pictures showed Carlos and his friends flashing what Ramona knew were gang signs.
Carlos’ gang, F13, is a well-known and violent gang that originated in South Central Los Angeles and became known for trafficking narcotics from Mexico. In the late 1990s, officials with the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department saw signs that F13 — which had been growing across the country — had spread to Kansas. The local F13 members ran petty street robberies and occasionally took swipes at their enemies with drive-by shootings. Kansas City, Kansas, police officials were unwilling to answer questions related to gang activity, saying even general queries were the subjects of ongoing investigations.
Originally, the members of Familia Loca — also known as FL — were part of the F13 gang. According to testimony from Alex Bruce, a Wyandotte County employee who works specifically with gang members, FL split away sometime in 2006. The two gangs operated in different areas. F13 was considered a south-side gang. FL was north side. But in early 2007, Bruce said, F13 started vandalizing graffiti that FL had sprayed on buildings well within their own territory. The two groups got into a turf war. Those initial volleys of spray paint escalated into physical confrontations.
The violence started down the path to murder in early 2007. According to court documents, Carlos and other F13 members were allegedly driving in a black Ford Expedition in January 2007 when they spotted José Franco Jr. and Valentino Hernandez, members of FL. Austin Quijas, who was a passenger in Carlos’ vehicle, allegedly opened fire on Hernandez at the intersection of Seventh Street and Central Avenue.
The next month, Familia Loca retaliated. According to Carlos, FL members walked up to his parents’ yellow stucco home on the night of February 19, 2007. He sat on the porch with some friends. Carlos told police that Hernandez and Franco fired shots into the black Expedition parked in the driveway and other vehicles that belonged to Carlos’ visitors.
[page]
The violence continued throughout the spring and came to a climax on April 1. That Sunday, Hernandez’s home — a worn white residence perched on a hill near 14th Street and Washington — was targeted. Hernandez, according to court testimony, later showed fellow gang members the holes that peppered his home from what looked like a .40-caliber handgun and an AK-47 assault rifle.
His house had been shot up twice before, according to the testimony of FL gang member Corey Cisneros. But Hernandez was particularly angry about the April 1 attack. He found a bullet in the mattress where his mother was sleeping that night and another round in a couch pillow where his nephew was lying.
Hernandez wanted revenge. The F13 member who lived the closest was Carlos Moreno. “Valentino said it was the right thing to do,” Cisneros testified. “An eye for an eye.”
When he woke up on Tuesday morning, Luis Gonzalez didn’t know the day would end with a deadly mission.
Standing barely 5 feet tall, with slender arms and spiky black hair, Gonzalez looks the part of his gang nickname — Duende, or “little elf.” At the time, the slight 16-year-old was a ninth-grader at Bishop Ward High School and a relatively new member of Familia Loca.
That Tuesday, he drove his mom’s white Oldsmobile Intrigue to school. He came back after school to look after his brothers until his mother got home from work. He headed out to his girlfriend’s house once it started to get dark. The two were watching TV when Gonzalez got a call from Daniel Perez Jr.
A dark-eyed teenager with short, close-cropped hair, Perez was Gonzalez’s close friend. They didn’t go to the same school, but Gonzalez said they knew each other from the streets. At the time, Perez attended Associated Youth Services, an alternative school for kids who had been suspended from the public system long term.
Perez became a member of Familia Loca in early 2006. He showed a tattoo of the letters “FL,” written in cursive on his upper-left pectoral, to a youth worker with El Centro, according to court testimony. He was given the name Sylvester, after the cartoon cat. That summer, he was charged with criminal possession of a firearm with a barrel longer than 12 inches and obstruction of justice. In December, he was charged again with obstructing the legal process.
By early 2007, though, Perez was looking for a way out of the gang. He told a teacher that his entire family was considering moving out of the state so he could distance himself from Familia Loca. He asked a youth worker about getting his tattoo removed, and he took a job at J.C. Penney in Overland Park.
Being part of Familia Loca wasn’t an identity that could be easily cast off. Cisneros testified that quitting the gang would be dangerous. Without the protection of the group, he explained, a former member risked being picked off by a rival gang.
If he was looking for a way out, Perez hadn’t found it by April 3. That night, he called Gonzalez to make plans to check in at Hernandez’s house. Gonzalez testified that he couldn’t recall what time they rode over, but when they arrived, a shotgun was propped near the front door. And, according to Gonzalez, Franco had a directive as soon as they walked in.
“He said we were just in time because we were about to do a mission,” Gonzalez testified.
[page]
Gonzalez was shocked. It was a Tuesday night — unusual timing for a drive-by shooting. But according to two gang members, Franco and Hernandez were highly ranked in the hierarchy of Familia Loca. They were “captains.” They had the right to give orders. If Gonzalez and Perez refused, they’d be subject to violations. That could mean anything from a punch in the face to being beaten to death.
Gonzalez testified that Franco took them into a small bedroom to explain the mission. Franco told Perez to sneak up to the side of Carlos Moreno’s house, crack a window and start shooting. Perez said that would take too much time. The two argued. Hernandez heard the raised voices and suggested they go to the front door instead. Perez was still hesitant.
According to Gonzalez, Hernandez grabbed the gun and pointed it at him. “You do it,” Hernandez commanded.
Hernandez shoved the weapon — a single-barrel black shotgun with a sawed-off pistol grip — at him.
“The gun’s too big,” Gonzalez said. With his slight frame, he argued, it would have too much of a kick for him to get off clean shots.
“You’re all a bunch of pussies,” Hernandez said.
Perez and Gonzalez sat silently in the room for a few moments. Gonzalez said he told Perez he had the car keys. They could just leave. Gonzalez said Perez didn’t want to risk violating his parole. But he didn’t want to get a gang violation, either. The two went back out to the living room. Perez told Hernandez he would do it.
According to an account by Gonzalez, Hernandez took them on a dry run of the crime. Gonzalez drove while Hernandez showed them the route — just a few blocks down 14th Street, along Minnesota Avenue and through an alley near 17th and Armstrong. Hernandez pointed out the house with the gate. Moreno’s pack of Newport cigarettes was still sitting on the ledge of the porch.
Gonzalez testified that when they got back, Franco sat at the dining-room table. He wore black gloves and was cleaning the shotgun. He wiped it down with “ointment” that he said would keep it from holding any fingerprints. Next to him was a box of shotgun shells with red tips. Franco gave Perez a pair of black gloves and the shotgun.
Perez threw the gun in the backseat of Gonzalez’s car and covered it with a jacket. The two alleged leaders followed their soldiers out to the car. They wished them luck. All four exchanged handshakes, twisting their fingers into the FL gang sign.
As they drove the half-mile to the Morenos’ home, Gonzalez said the two teenagers prayed. They asked God to make sure everything turned out OK. They prayed that they didn’t hit the wrong person.
The account of what happened next comes from Gonzalez’s and Cisneros’ court testimony.
Gonzalez parked in an alley and turned off the car while Perez put on the gloves, pulled up the hood on his black sweatshirt and grabbed the gun from the backseat. He watched Perez as far as the corner. A few second later, he heard shots.
Bang. Pause. Bang. Pause. Bang. Pause. Bang. Pause.
He turned on the car and saw Perez running, the shotgun in his right hand. The back door on the driver’s side was broken, so Perez threw the gun through the window and dashed around the back of the car. Perez was scared but excited as he jumped into the front seat.
“I can’t believe I did it,” he told Gonzalez.
[page]
As they drove back, Perez latched onto one image: the way the white curtains flew back from the narrow window in the door when the shots struck the house.
At Hernandez’s house on 14th Street, the three gang members were waiting on the front porch, smoking a blunt. Cisneros said Perez and Gonzalez were excited when they pulled up.
“We got him,” Perez told them as he got out of the car.
“Good job,” Hernandez said. “You guys did a mission without fucking up.”
They moved inside, and Hernandez slid the gun under a bed. Then they heard the sirens. First the police. Then the ambulance. They all knew what that meant.
“Man, you done shot somebody,” Cisneros told Perez.
After a half-hour, the two high schoolers left the alleged leader’s house. They drove west down Minnesota Avenue and passed the north end of Carlos’ street. The area was blocked off with police barricades and clogged with squad cars and emergency vehicles. Once he got home, Gonzalez said he turned on the TV. On a news report, he saw a man carrying a little girl out of a house. He didn’t have to wait long before Perez called.
“Calm down,” Gonzalez told Perez. “If you keep your mouth shut, I will, too.”
In the ambulance, Ramona begged her daughter to stay with her. At Children’s Mercy Hospital, she watched doctors wheel Yelena on a gurney, her head wrapped in a bandage. They told Ramona that a shotgun slug had damaged vital areas of her daughter’s brain — including the parts that controlled consciousness.
Ramona says she couldn’t let Yelena go. As Yelena was taken to intensive care, Ramona reminded her daughter that they’d bought the movie Happy Feet earlier that day. She told Yelena that she wanted to watch it with her again. At 2 a.m., the doctors determined that Yelena had fallen into a permanent vegetative state. The family agreed to disconnect the breathing machine. Even then, Ramona hoped for a miracle as they severed life support. But Yelena didn’t breathe.
On the day of her burial, Carlos helped Ramona dress Yelena and put make-up on her. She knew he felt guilty for his role in Yelena’s slaying, and she told him not to feel bad. But she questioned why he would get caught up in gang violence.
“Why are you fighting for a place that’s not ours?” she remembers asking him.
After the shooting, Carlos cooperated with police. He gave them the names of Familia Loca members and said he suspected that Franco and Hernandez were responsible for the shooting. But his rap sheet had grown during 2007. In July, he was in a car with stolen tags that was stopped by Kansas City, Kansas, police. He admitted to the cops that he was still a member of F13. In September, he pleaded guilty to charges of stealing a car in Jackson County, Missouri, and was placed on probation. In November, he was again arrested in Kansas City, Kansas, for domestic battery and assault on a law-enforcement officer. After he cooperated with prosecutors in their investigation of the shooting, the U.S. government deported Carlos to Mexico.
The police put out a pickup order for Franco and Hernandez, but they had already fled. Gang members testified that they believed Hernandez had gone to Mexico. He is still at large.
Franco’s girlfriend, Marylin Chavez, says Franco told her, in the days after the shooting, that he wasn’t involved. He said he didn’t order the shooting. But she tells The Pitch that Franco knew he’d be a suspect because of his affiliation with the gang and his past convictions.
[page]
According to juvenile-court records, Franco was convicted on two counts of aggravated robbery and criminal discharge of a firearm into an occupied dwelling in 2003. In 2006, he was charged with aiding a felon. In that case, he drove a getaway car from a drive-by shooting that severely injured two women. His lawyer argued in court documents that Franco didn’t know the gunman’s intent and, given Franco’s juvenile status, deserved a chance at probation. But Franco didn’t make any payments toward the $15,000 in restitution he was ordered to pay the two injured women and didn’t report to court officers. His probation was revoked.
On July 14, Franco was driving with a cousin when police in Kansas City, Kansas, spotted him. He tried to run, and police say he fired shots at the pursuing officers. On July 16, police charged him with assault on an officer, criminal possession of a firearm and trespassing.
That day, he also met with a homicide detective from Kansas City, Kansas. Franco told her that he knew what happened the night Yelena Guzmán was shot. He said it was Luis Gonzalez who drove and Daniel Perez who pulled the trigger. On July 19, Gonzalez told police that José Franco had given the order.
Before the end of the year, Wyandotte County District Attorney Jerome A. Gorman charged all four teenagers with first-degree murder.
On March 11, 2008, the morning that Daniel Perez began his trial on first-degree murder charges, the courtroom in the Wyandotte County District Court was cold and silent. Prosecutors wheeled in a dolly covered in binders thick with police statements and boxes of evidence sealed in manila envelopes. The Guzmán family lined the front row of the otherwise empty gallery.
Perez looked like a kid who’d been pulled out of class at a prep school. He wore a spotless white dress shirt, black slacks and a blank expression. The 17-year-old, who was being tried as an adult, occasionally scribbled notes on a yellow legal pad as Gonzalez testified against him.
In exchange for testifying against his friends, Gonzalez had agreed to plead guilty to first-degree murder charges in juvenile court; he could serve as much as seven years in detention. On the stand, his collarbone poked through the neckline of his navy detention-center jumpsuit, and the prosecutors had to remind him to speak up. He answered questions: “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” He cocked his head to one side and stole darting glances at Perez. He anxiously clasped and unclasped his hands, rubbing his thumbs into his palms.
In addition to Gonzalez’s testimony, prosecutors called Cisneros, who recounted what he had witnessed at Hernandez’s house. Cisneros didn’t participate in the planning of the shooting and wasn’t charged with a crime.
Prosecutors had an interpreter read transcripts of taped phone conversations that Perez made in jail. The teenager spoke often with his mother, discussing the evidence against him and worrying that the testimony against him was strong. In a phone call on December 21, Perez told his mother that praying didn’t ease his mind anymore.
“Are you guilty?” his mother asked.
“Of course, yes,” he responded.
Perez didn’t take the stand, and he didn’t respond to The Pitch‘s request for an interview. After three days of testimony, it took the jury just four hours to find Perez guilty of first-degree murder. Last week, Judge John McNally sentenced Perez to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 20 years.
During a stormy week in April, Franco sat in the same chilly courtroom facing charges of first-degree murder. Prosecutor Michael Russell argued to the jury that Franco was just as guilty of murder as Perez because he gave the order and then helped plan the shooting.
[page]
Franco was dressed in a polo shirt and khaki pants. His long black hair was neatly slicked back. Unlike Perez, with his empty stare, Franco looked scared as he surveyed the courtroom with tired eyes.
Gonzalez again recounted the events leading to the shooting. This time, he seemed more anxious. His legs bounced nervously. He looked more frequently toward the defendant’s table. After nearly an hour of questioning by the prosecutor, Gonzalez rubbed his face, as if on the verge of tears. Franco stared straight ahead.
William Dunn, Franco’s attorney, questioned Gonzalez’s story. On July 19, Gonzalez told police it was Franco who went on the dry run. In a September 6 statement, he said it was Hernandez. Dunn argued that the discrepancy should make jurors wary of Gonzalez’s account.
When Cisneros took the stand, he surprised prosecutors by becoming uncooperative. Cisneros pulled out a small piece of paper and read, “With all due respect to Mr. Russell and the court, I refuse to testify on José Franco until the safety of my family can be assured.”
Judge McNally told Cisneros that he had no right to refuse to testify. He wasn’t being charged in the case; if he kept quiet, he’d be held in contempt. Cisneros said he understood the consequences but still refused to talk.
Dunn didn’t call any witnesses. He didn’t have to, he argued in his closing statements. No physical evidence connected Franco to the crime. The only person linking Franco to the shooting was Gonzalez, a guy who rolled on his lifelong friend and changed his story in police statements, Dunn said. A guy who got a sweet deal in exchange for testifying, he added.
“You cannot convict on that kind of witness,” Dunn continued in closing statements. “You’ve got a jailhouse snitch. That’s it.”
As the jury filed out, Franco looked each of them in the eyes. Before lunch, the count was 9-3 in favor of conviction. The sticking point was Gonzalez’s credibility, whether his story could be trusted. After lunch, one juror still wasn’t convinced. At 3:30 p.m., the jury told McNally they were deadlocked. The judge declared a mistrial.
Russell assured the Guzmáns that the case would be retried. But sitting through a trial gets harder each time, Fernando says. Twice, he and Ramona had to look at photos of the house, lit up like a skeleton in the eerie glow of the police lights that night. Twice, they listened to the coroner describe Yelena’s wounds and saw images from her autopsy.
Fernando says it is striking to see such young kids sitting there in the defendant’s chair. But he doesn’t feel any sympathy. The teenagers, he says, have never tried to show him that they were sorry.
A month after Yelena’s death, Ramona found out she was pregnant. She gave birth to Fernando Jr. on January 11. The couple doesn’t want him to grow up surrounded by the kind of gang violence that cut short his sister’s life, so they’re considering leaving Kansas City, Kansas.
But Kansas City was Yelena’s home. This is where Fernando had hoped she’d play sports in high school before going on to college. So they buried her at the Maple Hill Cemetery in the Argentine District. They visit her most Sundays, on a slope dotted with evergreen trees. Her grave is marked with a graceful black headstone. In the middle, there’s a picture of the 2-year-old with pigtails and a subtle smile. Above the photo is written her affectionate nickname, “La Choky.”
[page]
On April 4, Yelena’s family and friends visited her grave to mark the one-year anniversary of her death. They brought her balloons and roses, placing them next to the silk daffodils, miniature Elmo toys and porcelain angels that surround the headstone.
Because of the harsh weather and the distance from the parking lot to the grave, Ramona had always insisted that Fernando Jr. keep warm in the car. But for the first time since he was born in January, the afternoon was mild and sunny.
“Look, Yelena, this is your brother,” Fernando told his daughter as he carried his son to her grave. “He loves you. He misses you.”
Fernando told her the family had to let her go but she’d always be in their hearts.
And then they let the balloons float into the sky.
Click here to write a letter to the editor.
