Feature: Slain youth's friend talks

Nineteen-year-old Gustavo Garcia of Sonoma, his face puffy from endless bouts of crying, sat on a bench near where his best and oldest friend, Luis Miranda, 17, had been shot to death Monday evening in what police are calling a gang-related slaying.
Sipping occasionally from a can of beer, Garcia spoke in slow, painful sentences about Luis, whom he had known since he was four years old, and about how he was not “a gang banger” but had repeatedly run afoul of the gang, the Sureños—three members of which are in custody and accused of having killed Miranda Monday evening in Maxwell Farms Regional Park.
Across from Garcia was a picnic table filled with an impromptu memorial for Miranda: flowers and flickering candles in enclosed holders, a white “Cal” baseball cap and numerous empty 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor. It is a tradition among the hip hop set to honor someone by dumping the contents of a 40-ouncer on the ground and placing the empty bottle in a place that honors a fallen comrade.
As Garcia talked, Luis’ mother and uncle came to the memorial. His uncle broke into tears when asked if either he or Luis’ mother would like to talk about Luis. His mother, her face chiseled with lines of distress and loss, softly said, “no.”
Luis, said Garcia, “had problems like everybody has, and if you pressed him he would press back.”
The last time he allegedly pressed back was Monday when a gray sedan with the slaying suspects inside pulled up close to where Luis had gathered with some friends and quickly became involved in a hot verbal confrontation involving, as police have characterized it, the “exchange of hostile gestures.”
The sedan left but between 30 and 40 minutes later at 6:48 p.m., one of the suspects, after working himself back to the park along a creek bed, bolted from behind some bushes and began firing into a crowd with a 16-gauge sawed off shotgun, hitting Miranda at least once in the face before the 17-year-old fell to the ground, mortally wounded.
The next morning three suspects were arrested: Juan Carlos Perez, 19, of American Canyon in Napa County; Javier Ceja, 19, of Sonoma; and a 17-year-old youth from Boyes Hot Springs whom officers would not identify because he is a juvenile.
Garcia, who was not present at the shooting, said everybody at the scene – which is near the property of the Boys and Girls Club Valley of the Moon – said the 17-year-old, who was familiar to many of those present, was the shooter.
A short time after the shooting, said Garcia, numerous youths called the 17-year-old on his cell phone. The boy was at home and “crying.” Garcia said, “He kept saying, ‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me.’”
Police have not identified which of the three suspects they believe was the shooter. All three, said Garcia, “are idiots who were all cracked up.”
He said the three had had frequent run-ins with Miranda, who used to taunt them by wearing red. Latino gang members, according to Garcia, consider the color an insult because it is a color not associated with Latino gangs but rather with gangs whose members are Caucasian or black. The three alleged members of the Sureño gang, whose colors are blue, always became enraged.
As Garcia talked, a soft breeze stirred the flames of a candle, soon to flicker out in the dry autumn air. Others had already gone out. Red wax that had dripped from them had become hard on the table bench and then beneath it on the concrete only a few feet from where Miranda had fallen and died.
The nearby scrub oak offered splashes of shade from the warm mid-day sun. Several yards away, a stone pedestrian bridge crossed the creek, which allegedly had hidden Miranda’s killer as he made his way towards his victim. The air was dusty.
Garcia said the three suspects are outcast in their own Sureño gang, which he indicated is among the reasons he characterized them as “idiots.”
Dressed in shorts, a T-shirt, sneakers and a baseball cap, Garcia paused for a moment and looked towards the memorial. Tears filled his eyes, which he dismissed with a sip of his beer.
Luis, he said, was no saint, but was also not bad. “He was about respect and pride and was not into gangs.” Looking at a reporter, his eyes filled with pain, Garcia said, “Please don’t make him sound like he was a gang banger.”