‘A Hole in His Soul’ : Few Are Surprised by the Violent Death of a Troubled Youth

When his gang brother was shot to death alone in his car at Thanksgiving, 16-year-old Jody Rodriguez--the fearless, undersized darling of the Vario Norwalk gang--was grief-stricken.

At the Rosary he flung himself into the open coffin sobbing, “I want to go with you.� Other gang brothers had to pry him away from the body of 18-year-old Anthony Rivera.

Six weeks later, Jody got a coffin and a lonely death of his own.

He was found face-down in Norwalk’s Hermosillo Park early the morning of Jan. 4, his body rain-soaked and bullet-riddled. Homicide detectives said a rival gang killed him 12 hours earlier. Nobody reported him missing.

People who knew Jody are not surprised that his life ended as early or as violently as it did. They are just sad--that they could not mend the “hole in his soul� in time to save him, that the peace he craved came exactly the way they feared it would.

When the mother of Jody’s best friend from Little League days heard there was a body in the park, her first reaction was, “It isn’t Jody, is it?�

Teacher Shirley Neal, a gang specialist in the Norwalk-La Mirada School District, told a visitor to her barrio classroom 14 months ago, “I know I’m going to lose Jody some day and it’s going to kill me.�

Street-tough, daring and self-destructive, Jody was born a drug baby years before they started arriving in large numbers in hospital nurseries. His mother had been addicted to PCP, and he spent the first three months of his life shaking violently as his infant body withdrew from the “angel dust,� those familiar with his background said.

Intensely loyal to his gang, Jody was the big brother every street kid wants. His popularity among his peers--troubled kids from equally troubled families--was rooted in his empathy for them, Neal said. “He always had time to listen. . . . He was always sharing. If he had enough money for chili and fries . . . then he bought them for everybody,� she said.

“He had a very high level of respect from other kids,� said Dan Kennan, a supervisor at Boys Republic in Chino, a facility for juvenile offenders where Jody was sent last year and furloughed from the day he died. “He had a lot of heart, he had a lot of care for other people. . . . I don’t know what it was, charisma or something.�

At the Chino facility, Kennan said, Jody had become such a big-brother figure that “there was almost a line of kids waiting� to talk over their problems with him.

Adults who work with gang youngsters were also drawn to Jody. He was open and affectionate in a world where most youths wear masks of hostility and defiance to hide their emotional despair.

“He was constantly reaching out for affection,� said his probation officer, Ray Fimbres. “Other kids, they’re hostile, they’ll try to mad-dog you, stare you down. But Jody, he would let himself be very vulnerable. He was not mean, he was not hostile, and he’d admit what he’d done wrong.�

Jody had told the classroom visitor, “I’m smart in school. I’m dumb in the things I do on the street. When I get mad, I just say what the (expletive).�

The street side of Jody was self-destructive. There was the PCP addiction, the nonstop delinquency that led to 20 arrests in 27 months, and the possibility that he took part in gang shootings.

But he was not always that way. “Jody was like my child and he just wasn’t the type of person he turned out to be,� said his best friend’s mother, who asked not be identified.

Jody’s elementary school principal, Marilyn Smith, remembers disciplining him only once--the day she caught him scrambling over the schoolyard fence to buy hamburgers for himself and some other boys.

“Had his life not started to unravel when he was 11 or 12 years old, would he have ended up where he did?� Smith asked.

Jody’s family turns away questions about his gang activity, about the drugs, the convictions, the probation violations.

The “unraveling� is detailed in his probation report. It says that Jody’s mother--the 15-year-old, unwed drug addict--handed her baby over to her parents within 10 days of his birth.

When Jody was 8 or 9, according to the report, he learned that the man and woman he called mom and dad were really his grandparents. Until then, he thought the young woman who visited occasionally was his “auntie.� He never knew who his father was.

Jody’s mother had three more children, all “PCP babies� periodically cared for by the grandmother. When Jody was about 11, the “auntie� hanged herself, a month after her boyfriend did the same.

A few months later, Jody was in a portable back-yard pool with a younger brother when an accident left the brother in a vegetative state. He is in a public institution today. Doctors who examined the nearly drowned child found injuries indicating he had been beaten, burned, and, possibly, sodomized. According to the probation report, the grandmother was convicted of child endangering, went to jail for six months and served three years on probation.

Jody and the other children became wards of the court. A relative was granted custody of the younger children. Jody was sent to a juvenile home, and, a year later, returned to the grandparents.

But the gang became Jody’s real family, says Sgt. Stuart Reed, a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detective. “You don’t have to be a sociologist to figure that out.�

Reed was assigned to investigate Jody’s killing. He knew him well, having interviewed him several times in connection with the murderous rivalry that exists between the Vario Norwalk gang and the Chivas gang in Artesia a few streets away.

“He was almost the prototype of a gang member,� Reed said. “And what you can do about that, I don’t know. All I can do is investigate this murder. That’s my function.�

Fimbres, the probation officer, thought he knew what Jody needed. He said in a report to the juvenile court that his self-destructiveness resulted from a burden of unexpressed grief.

“Grief has to be dealt with at the time or it becomes an open sore. He had a hole in his soul,� Fimbres said recently.

When Jody violated his probation early last year, Fimbres urged the court to send him to an institution that does not allow furloughs. Help him release his grief, keep him off his home turf, wean him from the gang.

A court-appointed psychologist agreed with Fimbres’ assessment but thought the troubled teen-ager could recover just as well at home.

Two months later Jody violated his probation a second time and Fimbres tried again. This time the judge sent Jody to Boys Republic. It allows furloughs. Jody arrived home on a 36-hour pass Jan. 3. A few hours later he was killed.

On Jan. 12, Jody’s body was lowered into the ground at Rose Hill Cemetery in the Whittier foothills. Two days later, Sgt. Reed announced he had a suspect in Jody’s killing. He is a Chivas gang member. He is 15.