"I want to go to work in a suit." -- Blythe Street dreams big

Our competitors over at the San Fernando Valley Sun have a well-put-together story on gang life. In it, they chat with Ernie Simental, a Blythe Street member who claims the gang but says he's no killer, Roberto Perez, who says he's inactive with Langdon Street, and Donald "Big D" Garcia, an ex-gangster who now works for Communities in Schools.

It's told in their own words and provides a good look into the pressures to join a gang and to get into trouble. It looks like Ernie, who seems like a smart guy, is beginning to think of a better future than jacking bikes and brawling:
There’s always fighting, and over a street that doesn’t even belong to us. That’s how stupid it is, but it’s the reality. It’s crazy, the reality of it, when you think about it, when you try to look at it from the inside, it’s so confusing you don’t know where to start.

He's pretty evocative of why the gang problem's so frustrating: you're dealing with emotional, irrational kids whose bad decisions are magnified because they involve violence and crime. Even for guys like him (and I think I may have met him while doing a story on the job program he got booted from last year after a parole violation), who want to do something with their lives, who realize that killing each other over street signs is futile, they keep messing up. Here's hoping he'll be one of the ones who gets straight and does something with his life. Otherwise, he'll join the ranks of forgotten statistics.