Most adults to whom I spoke in Lakewood shared a sense that something in town had gone wrong. Many connected this apprehension to the Spur Posse, or at any rate to certain Spur Posse members who had emerged, even before the arrests and for a variety of reasons, as the community’s most visible males. Almost everyone agreed that this was a town in which what had been considered the definition of good parenting—the encouragement of assertive behavior among male children—had for some reason got badly out of hand. What many people disagreed about was whether sex was at the center of this problem, and some people felt troubled and misrepresented by the fact that public discussion of the situation in Lakewood had tended to focus exclusively on what they called “the sex charges,” or “the sexual charges.”
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“People have to understand,” I was told by one plaintive mother. “This isn’t about the sexual charges.” Some believed the charges intrinsically unprovable. Others seemed simply to regard sex among teen-agers as a combat zone with its own rules, a contained conflict from which they were prepared, as the District Attorney was, to look away. Many seemed unaware of the extent to which the question of gender had come to occupy the nation’s official attention, and so had failed to appreciate the ease with which the events in Lakewood could feed into a discussion already in progress, offer a fresh context in which to recap Tailhook, Packwood, Anita Hill.
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This was not exactly what was going on in Lakewood. What happened this spring had begun, most people agreed, at least a year before, maybe more. There had been incidents, occurrences that could not be reconciled with the community’s preferred view of itself. There had been burglaries, credit cards and jewelry missing from the bedroom drawers of houses where local girls were babysitting. There had been assaults in local parks, bicycles stolen and sold. There had even been, beginning in the summer of 1992, felony arrests: Dana Belman, who is generally said to have “founded” the Spur Posse, was arrested on suspicion of stealing nineteen guns from the bedroom of a house where he was said to have attended a party. Not long before that, in Las Vegas, Dana Belman and another Spur, Christopher Russo, had been detained for possession of stolen credit cards. Just before Christmas of 1992 Dana Belman and Christopher Russo were detained yet again, and arrested for alleged check forgery.
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Much of what got talked about was, for a while, less actionable than plain troubling. Young children in Lakewood had come to know among themselves whom to avoid in those thirty-seven playgrounds, what cars to watch for on those hundred and thirty-three miles of No. 2 macadam. There had been threats, bullying tactics, the systematic harassment of girls or younger children who made complaints or “stood up to” or in any way resisted the whim of a certain group of boys. “I’m talking about throughout the community,” Karin Polacheck, who represents Lakewood on the board of education for the Long Beach Unified School District, told me. “At the baseball fields, at the parks, at the markets, on the corners of school grounds. They were organized enough that young children would say, ‘Watch out for that car when it comes around,’ ‘Watch out for these boys.’ I’ve heard stories of walking up and stealing baseball bats and telling kids, ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll beat your head in.’ . . . I’m talking about young children, nine, ten years old. You know, it’s a small community. . . . Younger kids knew that these older kids were out there.”
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“You’re dead,” the older boys would reportedly say, or “You’re gonna get fucked up,” “You’re gonna get it,” “You’re gonna die.” “I don’t like who she’s hanging with, why don’t we just kill her now.” There was a particular form of street terror mentioned by many people: invasive vehicular maneuvers construed by the targets as attempts to “run people down.” “There were skid marks outside my house,” one mother told me. “They were trying to scare my daughter. Her life was hell. She had chili-cheese nachos thrown at her at school.” “They just like to intimidate people,” I was repeatedly told. “They stare back at you. They don’t go to school, they ditch. They ditch and then they beg the teacher to pass them, because they have to have a C average to play on the teams.” One young woman told me, “They came to our house in a truck to do something to my sister. She can’t go anywhere. Can’t even go to Taco Bell anymore. Can’t go to Jack in the Box. They’ll jump you. They followed me home not long ago, I just headed for the sheriff’s office.”
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There were odd quirks here, details that might not have seemed entirely consistent with normal adolescent acting up (the nineteen guns in the bedroom, the high-school trips to Vegas and to Laughlin, which is a Vegas spinoff on the Colorado River below Davis Dam), but they seemed for a while to go unconnected. People who had been targeted by the older boys believed themselves, they said later, “all alone in this.” They believed that each occasion of harassment was discrete, unique. They did not yet see a pattern in the various incidents and felonies. They had not yet made certain inductive leaps. That was before the pipe bomb.
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The pipe bomb exploded on the front porch of a house not far from Lakewood High School between three and three-thirty on the morning of February 12th. It destroyed one porch support. It tore holes in the stucco. It threw shrapnel into parked cars. Susie Hipp remembers that her husband was working the night shift at Rockwell and she was sleeping light as usual when the explosion woke her. The next morning, she asked a neighbor if she had heard the noise. “And she said, ‘You’re not going to believe it when I tell you what that was.’ And she explained to me that a pipe bomb had blown up on someone’s front porch. And that it had been a gang retaliatory thing. ‘Gang thing?’ I said. ‘What are you talking about, a gang thing.’ And she said, ‘Well, you know, Spur Posse.’ And I said, ‘Spur Posse, what is Spur Posse?’ ”
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