Gang Mom (5 page)

“She’s willing to get involved to try to change that. It’s interesting to find a crusader who seems to be able to keep things in perspective, who can connect with these kids without going into a Chicken Little posture.”

The article went on to describe Thompson this way: “To youth gang members, the 39-year-old Thompson is a den mother of sorts. She knows their real names and their street tags. She knows where they hang out and what their graffiti spells. She can flash [gang] hand signals and run off phrases of cryptic slang as quickly as any 14-year-old [gang member].”

“I try to fight back against gangs, but I also try to understand the gang issues,” Mary is quoted in the article. “They’re people too and they’re doing this for a reason. I figure if I can get close to the source I’ll be able to understand it a little better.”

Cautioning adults, she concluded, “Parents need to know who their kids are hanging out with, what’s in their notebooks, what’s in their pockets. And they need to know where they are at 2 a.m.

“I knew where Beau was all my waking hours, but I didn’t know ‘Bishop’ the gang member was crawling out his bedroom window at 2 every morning.”

It was an impressive story, and television and radio stations dispatched reporters to record her when she counseled kids against joining gangs. Camera crews followed Mary down the street as she pointed out gang graffiti. Mary was opening parents’ eyes to this growing menace.

On television, there didn’t seem to be anything special about her at first. Just under forty, Mary Thompson was tall and stocky, with short, reddish-brown hair. She really looked ordinary, until the camera caught her eyes. They were intense, drawing you in with the fervor behind her words. Charismatic.

“Well, I’m going into schools to counsel against joining gangs, and I’m looking for kids other kids listen to, to join me,” Mary told Janyce during their first conversation. “And I understand that Aaron is exactly the type of kid I should have on our side.”

“Oh, Aaron is violently against gangs,” Janyce answered. “And I know he’d love to join you.”

She was right; Aaron liked to help people and what better way than to help them avoid the gang lifestyle that never led anyone anywhere but to prison or an early grave? Aaron Iturra readily joined Mary’s anti-gang crusade.

Mary stopped by the Iturra house frequently to take Aaron with her to gang-prevention seminars. While waiting for Aaron to get ready, Mary and Janyce would talk. They had so much in common.

“Beau’s my life, Beau’s my life. I would do anything to protect Beau,” Mary told Janyce.

“I understand that,” Janyce, an attractive, middle-aged woman, answered. “Aaron is my life too. He’s our rock. I hardly ever lock my doors. My son is our protector. His four brothers and sisters idolize him.” It was then that Aaron appeared.

Aaron had the striking features of his Indian ancestors. At six-foot-five and 230 pounds, he was the kind of person people looked up to, literally and figuratively. Though he had had some skirmishes with gangs, Aaron had rejected them and remained proudly independent. No one messed with him.

During subsequent conversations, Mary asked Aaron to keep Beau out of trouble. She wanted the older boy to assume the role of protector for the younger. Aaron agreed, but no matter how much Janyce and Mary wanted to keep their kids from turning to the dark side, over the next few years, Eugene’s growing gang community continued to seduce its young.

Jim Michaud drove his car into the underground garage that housed the department’s unmarked police vehicles. After getting out, he happened to glance at his new set of license plates. They said “40202.” A twenty-two-year veteran of the force, the numbers stood for his retirement date—April 2, 2002.

When the city manager of Eugene publicly declared that cops should stop talking so much about their retirement dates, Detective Jim Michaud promptly went out and got his new plate. That was Michaud: always bucking authority. And his superiors stood for it because Michaud was the best investigator in the Violent Crimes Squad. Never mind that he was the department’s union negotiator, who beat their butts come contract time. The bottom line was, he cleared cases.

Michaud walked up the stairs into a low-lying, official-looking white building. This was the Department of Public Safety, one of a series of such buildings located in downtown Eugene. The Violent Crimes Squad occupied a small run-down office on the first floor. The squad room was long and narrow, filled with ten sets of hand-me-down furniture that lined the perimeter of the room.

On Michaud’s desk, in the far corner on the left, were three piles of folders. Each represented cases that he characterized as: “front burner,” “back burner” and “double-wrapped freezer.”

The double-wrapped freezer pile consisted of cases that had grown as cold as a corpse in the morgue; the back burner cases would get solved eventually; the front burner cases were hot and had to be solved now. At the top of his front burner pile was the Iturra case.

Iturra’s gang connection seemed the logical place to start. Eugene had two officers who specialized in gang activity and intelligence. One of them was Detective Ric Raynor, the other Chuck Tilby. Michaud called Raynor. After exchanging pleasantries, Raynor volunteered that he had a great contact in the gang community.

“Who’s that?” Michaud asked.

“Mary Thompson. The papers call her ‘Gang Mom.’”

“Yeah, I saw her on some TV report a while back.”

It had been the same news segment Janyce Iturra had seen, with Mary showing gang graffiti on camera. The difference was, Mary had looked familiar to Michaud. He had seen her someplace before. But he’d soon forgotten about her after the segment aired. Maybe in his files …

“Mary’s very influential in the gang community,” Raynor continued. “Mary can talk gang talk and gang slang as good as any gangster on the street. She could convince somebody to turn themselves in to me. I’ll go out and talk to her immediately.”

“Thanks, Ric,” Michaud said, and hung up. He turned to his filing cabinet and began rifling through it.

Mary Thompson had first come to see Ric Raynor in early 1994. She was concerned about Beau’s involvement with gangs and didn’t know what to do about it. Raynor was immediately impressed by her concern, her intelligence, her willingness to do something about what was happening to her son and the city’s youth, who were getting sucked up into the gang lifestyle.

In order to combat gangs, Raynor felt, you needed to understand them. At first, Mary was totally ignorant. But over time, she came to develop a working knowledge of gangs on the street. Raynor and others in the police department felt that she came by her knowledge the hard way, by monitoring her son’s street activities.

Mary had also become an advocate for kids, showing them that she understood the pressures they were under, the lack of love in their home lives and the lure of the gangs, which provided a sense of family and empowerment at the same time.

Raynor was impressed with the way that, over the next few years, Mary had learned the intricacies of the gang lifestyle. She knew what wearing gang rags or colors meant, what secret signs gangs used to communicate with one another, and what
sets
, gang subdivisions, were.

Mary could talk the talk and walk the walk as well as any gang member. She was “cool,” respected by gangsters and cops alike for her impartiality, her sensitivity, her compassion. What was most impressive was her influence with the gangs.

As Raynor told Michaud, Mary could convince a kid involved with a crime to turn himself into the cops or, for that matter, she could influence him to talk or not talk to the cops, to associate or not associate with a particular gang cop. In short, she had power on both sides, in the criminal gang community and in law enforcement. She was a modern-day power broker among the disenfranchised young people of the city of Eugene.

Raynor drove out from downtown Eugene to interview Thompson. He felt certain that her network of teenage gang members would tell her what had happened.

Mary Thompson worked as a security guard for a local department store, but because she worked a later shift, she was home when Raynor drove up.

“Hi, Ric,” she said when she answered the door of her home.

“Mary,” Raynor said, and nodded at the stocky woman with the large eyes behind the owlish glasses.

Ric Raynor liked and respected Mary Thompson. He often phoned her when he was out looking for teenage suspects. She, in turn, paged him all the time with information on gang activities. He thought of her as a concerned mother who had gotten involved in her anti-gang activity to alert the community to a pressing social problem.

“Mary, Aaron Iturra’s been murdered.”

“I heard. It’s been on the news.” She looked down in grief. “I really liked Aaron.”

“I know you did, Mary. Can you think of anyone who had it in for him, anyone who’d want him dead?”

She hesitated. Raynor knew she didn’t want to be thought of as a
stoolie
. Her effectiveness as an anti-gang activist depended on the goodwill and respect she had built up among the city’s gang population. She didn’t want to blow that by becoming an informer. But at the same time, Aaron was a boy whom she had liked a lot.

“Okay, look,” she began. “There was this guy who came around to see me.”

“When?”

“Around a week ago.”

“Driving?”

“Yeah, a black Acura. Said he was a gang member up in Portland. He said his name was Sonny and sat on my couch and wanted to know about this thing at the Grocery Cart and wanted to know about Aaron. And, I wouldn’t tell him very much about Aaron because he wanted a picture. And, he wanted me to tell him where he lived and I wouldn’t tell him that.”

“Tell him anything?”

Mary hesitated.

“Sonny, he was a scary-looking dude. I was afraid if I didn’t tell him something, he’d come back again and this time he’d be looking for me.”

“So what did you tell him?”

“The truth. That Aaron was released from jail with no charges and that he lied in the police report.”

“Then what happened?”

Mary shrugged. “He left.” She gave Raynor a description of Sonny. Other than that, she didn’t know anything else. But she did have a question.

“Ric, isn’t there some kind of test you guys do when you think someone’s fired a gun?”

“Yeah, a paraffin test. Why?”

“And the idea is to determine if someone fired a gun recently, right?”

“Right. So why you asking all this?”

“Because I’m thinking that maybe that’s a way for you guys to get to the bottom of this. If you can get this guy Sonny and give him the test and it confirms that he fired a gun, then you’d have your shooter.”

“Exactly. But we have to find him first.”

“Know what kind of caliber the bullet was?”

“Not yet.”

It was a highly unusual exchange. Unlike “The Rockford Files,” for example, cops didn’t regularly release information on an active investigation to a civilian, but Mary Thompson wasn’t just some ordinary person.

Back at headquarters a short time later, Raynor told Michaud of his conversation with “Gang Mom.” Michaud thanked him for his help and proceeded to make some inquiries of Portland police. After interviewing them, and conducting an exhaustive search of computer records, no gang member named “Sonny” was found in the Portland area, or any place else in Oregon. Michaud called Raynor back into his office.

“I think Mary’s lying. I think she’s heavily involved,” Michaud told Raynor.

Raynor, though, preferred to believe her involvement was more peripheral. Maybe she knew who the shooters were and just wasn’t telling out of fear she’d lose the respect of the gang members she regularly counseled.

After Raynor went back to his office, Michaud felt uneasy. He was afraid that Raynor’s close contact with Thompson might be clouding his judgment. Michaud turned back to his desk and plucked a folder from the “hot” pile that he had unearthed earlier from his files. It contained the record of his first contact with Mary Thompson. Only at that time, her name wasn’t Thompson.

It was Fockler.

TWO

The Investigation

FIVE

When Mary Fockler left Cleveland in early 1978, she hitchhiked to Oregon. Almost immediately, her life began to change radically.

Mary was pregnant. She wasn’t sure who the father was, but she suspected it was a fellow Cleveland native she had had a brief fling with before she moved west. Regardless, she now had a baby on the way and no visible means of support.

Mary settled in the funky rural community of Wolf Creek, Oregon. Maybe she was looking for a father figure; it is hard to tell. What is clear is that she met
Frank Wilman
, a man thirty-one years her senior. They hit it off and decided to live together. Wilman was apparently not very good with math because when Mary’s son Beau was born on August 6, 1978, she told him that Beau was his. Wilman apparently bought this, but Mary decided to give the infant the surname of “Flynn,” the boy’s probable biological father.

Wilman remembers Beau as being a “good kid.” He helped the boy enjoy outdoor sports like horseback riding and fishing. The three had settled into a life together and in 1981, they made it official when Mary and Frank were married. As befits the naturalistic leanings of the community they lived in, the ceremony took place on horseback!

It didn’t take long for Mary to get involved in the local drug trade. She would later describe her involvement as being a “field investigator” for the Josephine County Police Department. What she really was was a
snitch
, an informant for money.

Mary made methamphetamines, and she informed on her associates in the drug trade, enough times to accrue a balance of $1,100 in her bank account, which she used to beat a hasty retreat from Wolf Creek and its law-breaking population. She left Beau behind with Frank Wilman.

Starting anew, for a second time, was a priority, but Mary soon realized that leaving her baby behind was no solution to her problems. She came back to Wilman’s trailer, where he was living with Beau. She was accompanied by her new boyfriend “Tag.” Wilman takes up the story: