Speaking From Experience

VENTURA —  It’s nothing new or innovative, the things Ventura Police Officer Jesus Quezada has to say to the kids he sees struggling between right and wrong.

He simply reminds them, the ones dealing with the drug-addicted moms and the nonexistent dads, that there is another way to live.

You don’t have to sell meth to make a living. You don’t have to join the gang next door to survive. You don’t have to go to prison to prove you’re a man.

Just about the time the street-hardened kids roll their eyes at the tired lecture they’ve heard from cops and probation officers alike, Quezada proves he knows what he’s talking about.

Driving past a four-bedroom home in the rough-and-tumble Cabrillo Village neighborhood, a poverty-stricken stretch of housing in the west end of Ventura County known for a steady stream of police calls, the young officer pointed to a small yellow home at the end of a cracked sidewalk.

“That was my house,” Quezada said of the home where he and his four siblings grew up.

Mom and Dad live there still.

For the past year, Quezada has served as Ventura’s Youth Intensive Intervention Officer, a grant-funded position created just over a year ago to focus on 24 troubled kids and their families.

Included among those in his charge are some families that live in his old backyard in Cabrillo Village.

“It was hard at first, coming back here, acting like a cop,” said Quezada, who remembers his old friends meeting him with cold stares when he first showed up in uniform. “But I let them know I’m still the same guy that grew up here. Now I’m just in a position to help them, too.”

Today, when he visits some of the city’s most downtrodden neighborhoods, kids hungry for attention call out his name. Moms stop him on the street to share problems. And he pauses, usually offering little more than some time and attention--exactly what they wanted.

“That’s where he’s real effective,” said Quezada’s boss, Lt. Ken Korney. “He has the background where he can identify with the youth in a way some other officers just can’t. He talks to them, identifies. And then he crosses over and talks to the parents, too.”

Quezada, 28, never thought he’d end up on this side of the law.

He was born in Chicago to a family that struggled against poverty. Hoping for a better life in California, where the weather was warm and farm work was plentiful, his father, a Mexican immigrant, moved west. Quezada was 5 when his family settled into Cabrillo Village.

His father found work picking crops in nearby fields. The young Quezada, as he grew up, fell in with a rough crowd. Among his pals were some of the toughest gang members in the neighborhood. Plenty had tattoos announcing their gang ties. Some were in and out of jail.

*

School became a low priority. By the time he was 13, he announced to his parents that he had had enough. He was quitting, just like so many of his friends.

No problem, his father told him, forget class.

It was roughly 4 a.m. the next morning, before the sun lit up the sky, when his father ordered him out of bed. It was time to work. For two days he labored alongside his father, bending deep in the fields to pluck strawberries until his back ached.

By day three, he was back behind a school desk.

“My father worked in the fields all his life,” Quezada said. “He didn’t want that for his kids. This was his way of showing me why.”

But not every memory of home is as uplifting. His father, he said, drank often. Quezada admires him, though, for rising in the earliest morning for work--a commitment that allowed his children to focus on school.

Still, it took the death of a close friend to help Quezada change.

The friend was Ronaldo, a wrestling team legend at Buena High School. A college scholarship was on the horizon.

But gunfire erupted one night in their neighborhood, and Ronaldo and another teenager were killed. A rival gang was responsible.

“That was a real eye-opener,” Quezada said. “I thought, ‘Is this what I want to happen to me? Do I really want this as my life?’ ”

Quezada took school more seriously after that. He graduated and, on the advice of a family friend, decided on a career in law enforcement.

The day he graduated from the police academy, Quezada’s father, the weathered field worker with a tough-love edge, began to weep.

“You know what,” said Quezada, his voice softening, “that was the first time I ever saw my dad cry.”

He began with the Santa Paula Police Department, working as a patrol officer for three years. But he transferred into the Ventura Police Department as soon as there was an opening.

“This is where I lived, I grew up,” Quezada said. “And it’s where I wanted to work.”

Quezada began his assignment as a Youth Intensive Intervention Officer in April 1999. Under a $600,000 grant, Quezada and Deputy Probation Officer Marleen Houlihan are charged with befriending two dozen 10- to 15-year-olds teetering on the edge.

School counselors and probation department officials refer most of the students. These aren’t kids with rap sheets. But other signs point to problems: truancy, fights at school, maybe gang friends. Nearly all have difficulties at home--a big brother in jail, an overwhelmed mother. At least half have absent fathers.

So the young officer, now with a wife and 2-year-old of his own, has taken on a big brother role in many of Ventura’s financially strapped neighborhoods. When listening or talking to his young charges, he’s compassionate, patient. Often he uses humor to make a connection.

But he’s no pushover. The punishment for skipping school, for example, is a personal police escort to and from school.

Other officers occasionally drag one of Quezada’s wayward flock into the Ventura Avenue storefront office where he works.

“When we see one of his kids coming through the door,” said Kim Anklin, an administrative analyst who works in Quezada’s office, “the first thing out of their mouths is, ‘Don’t call Officer Quezada, please!’ They just need that male role model. That father figure.”

April, a single mother living in a two-room apartment in west Ventura, relies on Quezada to keep her 9-year-old son from following in the footsteps of his older brother--and herself.

Both have struggled with drugs. She is fighting an addiction to methamphetamine. She’s unemployed, but just finished a job-training course offered through the county and is hoping to get something soon.

Her eldest son is serving time with the California Youth Authority on a drug possession charge.

That’s where Quezada can help, she said. He is the positive male role model that her youngest, who never met his father, has never known.

“Most men he’s seen in my life are bad decisions and he can’t respect them,” said April, ticking off the instances of domestic violence her son has witnessed. “But to see this officer, he’s got such a real heart for kids. And to see him here, backing up mom, it really helps.”

Sitting next to Tim, who has been getting into fights at school, Quezada does his best to draw him out. But the boy is shy. It’s a trust issue, Quezada said. He doesn’t trust the police. He’s accustomed to seeing them on his front porch arresting his mother for drug abuse.

“He used to tell me, ‘You are the bad guys. You are the ones who took my mom away,’ ” Quezada said of their first meeting.

But slowly, the boy’s guard is coming down. He talks about wanting to play football this year, but it costs $150 to join the city’s team. Quezada says he’ll see what he can do. And he promises to take the boy to an upcoming Dodgers game--a promise that brings a smile to the boy’s face.

“I think he’s a nice man,” Tim says of Quezada. “He’s just trying to help me. I don’t want to end up like my brother. I want to be a good big brother, if I ever get a little brother like me. I don’t have one right now.”

Quezada said he tries to talk to the kids on their own level. Honesty, he said, is the key.

“They will see right through you,” Quezada said. “They have a way of doing that.”

On patrol, he spots another one of his flock, 13-year-old Joseph, who copes with an alcoholic father and a brother who is in and out of jail. He visits with the boy’s mom and learns that her son is struggling with school, but he’s otherwise doing OK. As they speak, Joseph looks on.

“I want to be like him when I grow up,” the boy said. “I want to be a police officer like him, because when you help the kids, you feel proud of yourself.”

*

Quezada said he does feel pretty proud of himself these days. Especially when he considers how his life could have gone. He still sees plenty of his old friends. Sometimes they’ve just been released from jail.

“And they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I just got out. But I’m trying to turn my life around,’ ” Quezada said.

Hearing those words, he can’t help but think of the kids in his program.

“Everything I tell them about my life,” Quezada said, “everything I try to teach them--I hope somehow or another they’ll keep it all in the back of their mind and remember, ‘You know, somebody told me there was a different way. And you know, they were right.’ ”