Young Gang Shooting Victim Mourned By Police

Joey Mendoza, 13, who was gunned down Wednesday night in the Lower Ocean Street neighborhood, was well known to Santa Cruz Police.

He was one of the kids they were trying to save from street gangs managed out of California prisons.

Police have no suspects yet, but they found a stolen van that had been set afire in a Coralitos gulch and could be tied to the case. Santa Cruz Police Deputy Chief Rick Martinez said this case would likely be solved based on witnesses and evidence they are gathering.

Mendoza was walking from his grandmother's house on Bixby Street toward the Metro center to catch a bus to his home in Watsonville when a car or van pulled up and shot him twice in the back. He was pronounced dead shortly after the 8 p.m. shooting and his body was kept on the street as police began investigating.

"I can't say he was minding his own business," said Martinez. "I wish I could. He was clearly representing a prison gang."

He was in the Sureños, said Martinez. The street gang was founded in 1968 in Los Angeles prisons and is still run by incarcerated convicts. It is identified by the color blue and sports team clothing including the Dodgers, Los Angeles Lakers, San Jose Sharks, Oakland Raiders and Dallas Cowboys.

Santa Cruz Police had reached out to Mendoza, asking him to join its PRIDE program, a training course to help get kids involved in the community and out of gangs by taking them to such places as the KION TV studio, San Quentin and horseback riding, to show them the difference between good and bad decisions.

He declined.

The County Office of Education also worked with him, getting him a football scholarship to play Pop Warner football, Martinez said. That's where he had been the afternoon of the shooting.

But in the morning, said the deputy chief, he had been involved in gang activity that couldn't yet be released because of the ongoing investigation.

"The whole team is devastated," said Martinez. "We honestly consider this a step backwards. This is a worst-case scenario. It's everything you are striving to avoid with intervention and prevention programs. It's exactly what we are trying to prevent."

The County Board of Education canceled a meeting of its gang prevention program called Basta on Thursday because they were so shaken up about the killing.

"If he had taken us up on our PRIDE program, he might be alive today," said Martinez. "We have to shift our youth away from that gang culture. Often times the mainstream media glamourizes that lifestyle."

Martinez said gang prevention agencies would look into what went wrong and see if they could do better.

"He was a popular kid and well-known. A lot of people liked him. It certainly gives us no joy telling the community that this was another lost gang member and our intervention and prevention methods weren't enough. It's hopefully a lesson learned and the community takes it as such."