An urban tragedy
On Tuesday, this reporter attended plaintive funeral services for 22-year-old Deivon McGee, a local man who became the city's 49th homicide when he was gunned down outside a taco stand on Oct. 20.
The service was in many ways similar to others I've attended over the last two years marking the end of the lives of young men and boys killed in senseless street violence. Kids wore shirts with McGee's visage printed on them. Pastors abhorred the scourge of gun violence. Loved ones wept, sometimes while swaying to religious hymns.
Below, loved ones gripped in anguish/photo by Gabriel Acosta
![16680591E[1].jpg](http://www.insidesocal.com/sb/sbnow/16680591E%5B1%5D.jpg)
Political figures also turned out, in this case 6th Ward councilman Rikke Van Johnson and 5th Ward candidate Carolyn Tillman, to pay their respects to a slain resident.
One theme Tuesday was choice. Clergy urged those in the audience, many the young men and boys whose lives disproportionately wind up wasted by violence and prison, to take Jesus Christ into their lives and make the right decisions.
But while they did, the material reality was evident just beyond the church walls: The disinvested community, the under-performing schools, the paucity of job opportunities, even the decades-long infrastructural legacy of freeways that steer traffic away.
A sad story, for everyone.
Read the full story, with more pics, by clicking below ...
SAN BERNARDINO - In life, Deivon McGee liked to make people laugh. In death, with more than 300 friends and family sitting before his metallic casket, there was still laughter.
But just 10 days after a hail of bullets halted the 22-year-old's newfound lease on life in a Saturday night drive-by shooting, the laughter took on a darker, more mournful tone.
Amid the laughter were weeps, wails and calls to cease the violence.
"The answers," Arlington Rodgers, McGee's uncle told the crowd, "are not running around (and) pulling triggers. My nephew is lying here before us because someone pulled a trigger. Someone thought it made them a man."
photo by Gabriel Acosta
![16680587E[1].jpg](http://www.insidesocal.com/sb/sbnow/16680587E%5B1%5D.jpg)
McGee's funeral at the San Bernardino 16th Street Seventh-day Adventist Church on Tuesday was a mix of joy, pain, humor and righteous calls to end street violence in a Westside community that has laid at least three children and a number of young adults to rest since last year.
McGee, who was born in Riverside and raised in San Bernardino, was shot to death while getting dinner with his father at Tacqueria Vasquez, a walk-up taco stand near the corner of Medical Center Drive and Union Street. McGee died in front of his father from a gunshot wound to the head, witnesses said. Three boys, ages 9, 14 and 16 were also shot in the fusillade of gunfire unleashed from a passing car. Those three survived.
Here are two youngsters in attendance Tuesday/photo by Gabriel Acosta:
![16680593E[1].jpg](http://www.insidesocal.com/sb/sbnow/16680593E%5B1%5D.jpg)
Doubly tragic, McGee's friends and family said at his funeral, was that he was committed to turning his life around after growing up in a tough neighborhood and getting into trouble as a youth.
He was sentenced to three years in prison on a robbery charge at age 17, Rodgers said.
"He went in a boy, but he came out a man," Rodgers said.
McGee had recently enrolled in classes at San Bernardino Valley College and hoped to participate in the football program.
On Tuesday, he wore a dark suit in an open casket, the sight of his repose sending numerous mourners out of the worship hall in tears.
People in the Westside housing project near where McGee lived with his grandmother, and died on Oct. 20, remembered him as a friendly, mature young man who was excited about buying a used car and going to college. The liquor-store owner who chatted with McGee just moments before he was killed took up a collection basket to help pay for the services.
Speakers at the service also highlighted the tragic plight of the neighborhood and residents' duty to improve it. Again and again, the twin themes of faith in Jesus Christ and the senselessness of street violence pervaded the service.
Rodgers railed at the futility of "street-toughness."
"Street credit can't buy you anything," he said.
As a macabre reminder of the long-simmering unrest on the Westside, those who eulogized McGee said the family suffered a similar tragedy in 1989, when McGee's uncle, Jason Bradley, was shot to death on nearby Western Avenue.
After the services, as the procession was mobilizing to take McGee's body to Mountain View Cemetery, another of the man's uncles, Derek Rodgers, said the community's decay has taken a toll.
"It's changed around here because of a combination of factors, economics, education, no jobs, the structure of society has broken down," Derek Rodgers, 39, said.
"He was determined to never go back (to prison). Now he's leaving to a better place, and he's never going to come back here."
robert.rogers@sbsun.com
(909) 386-3855
Tragic...just tragic.
It gets rather tiresome to see the weary old litany of excuses dragged out time and time again to rationalize the inexcusable behavior of people who live (and die) in the Westside in 2007
Cut off from the freeway are they? The freeway was designed immediately after World War II. In those days, there were virtually no African-Americans living on the Westside to "wall off." No exits were built on the west side of the freeway because of the difficulty presented in those days of spanning the railroad tracks on that side. Those tracks were the lifeline of the industry that sustained the economic vitality of the Westside: the Santa Fe Railway. It was an industry that had provided jobs to MINORITIES for a half-century and had moved refugees fleeing from the instability of the Mexican Revolution into the American middle class.
If freeway exits were the cure-all of economic ills how come, even as we speak, the Redevelopment Agency is buying up and demolishing the motels that sprang up in the mid-20th century in response to the freeway's emplacement?
Lousey schools? The schools on the Westside have the same administration, staffing and supplies as schools in every other part of the district. How come traditionally students at the old Muscott School (now Inghram) outpaced those at adjoining Rio Vista, even though each had the same ethnic mix? You speak of underperforming schools. Could it be underperforming students, underperforming families?
I notice in your pictures that the mourners are wearing their clothing backwards (their hast
) -- in a church, no less! Could that be an indication that something is wrong? Could that be an indication that the elders of their community pay lip service, but do not instill and DEMAND a sense of discipline, a sense of reverence or a sense of ethics among young people?
Since I was nor there, I do not know what Scripture the preachers read over the body of this unfortunate young man, but they well might have read the words of the prophet Hosea, "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind:it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal." Alas, the elders offer no direction and the children die.
To the Old Cynic;
While I am not going to dispute that much of the problem we face can be remedied in the home one cannot discount the social and economic disenfranchisement of this community. I am going to dispute some of the information you portray as factual.
First, the alignment of what is today I215 first opened in 1963 as what was then US Route 395, this route was then decommissioned in 1972 in favor of I15E and then in 1982 redesignated I215 north of SR60. It did not have its inception just after WWII and its present lack of access to the west side was engineered with the purported purpose of steering traffic to downtown(another failed attempt at economic revitalization no doubt originated by city hall).
The motels you speak of sprang up during the 30's, 40's, and 50's as a reault of the economic boon created by the completion of US Route 66 on Nov. 11,1926. These businesses were left to rot by those who devised the alignment for Rte 395/I215 albeit they played a significant role in the history of the development of our city as a gateway. This is one of the best examples of the continued lack of concern over westside redevelopoment by city hall since the inception of I215 in the early eighties.
As for African-Americans on the westside, they came first as part of the railroads as in the late 19th century railroad employment was one of the few opportunities that existed and afforded them a middle class existence. But then this is the same railroad that perpetrated the economic and cultural robbery of Native Americans throughout the 19th century, socially exploited Chinese immgrant labor and through the empowerment gained during the Wilson administration was able to use unionization to all but eliminate black employment. You fail in your praise of the railroads contribution to our economy to note that their biggest contribution has been to their shareholders and founders wealth and power at the expense of anyone and anything that would stand in their way.
Please note that my correcting you on some of your facts is by no means an attempt to rationalize irrational behavior. It is instead offerd as an insightful look at causative social mechanisms that have played a role in bringing us to where we are today. It is time for those of us in this city who care to stop laying blame and begin a collabrative effort to change what can only be described as the downward spiral of our community.