The violent incidents last week capped a month of gang-related violence that resulted in the shooting of three young men by fellow Latinos, none of whom had taken part in the Pico Collaborative.

The most recent spree of violence -- which resulted in the fatal shooting of an alleged West Los Angeles gang member in the Pico Neighborhood on Dec. 27 -- came after a year-long lull in gang-related killings.

The violence had peaked in October of 1998, when all hell seemed to break lose in the Pico Neighborhood. Despite a 43 percent decline in gang related crimes from the previous year, a month-long gang war resulted in the death of four men in little more than two weeks.

On October 12, Omar Sevilla, 22, was gunned down on Pico Boulevard near Sixth Street. Five days later, a man chased Juan Martin Campos, 28, into the back room of a liquor store on the corner of Pico and 20th Street, gunning him down.

On October 27, two brothers, Michael Juarez, 27, and Anthony Juarez, 19, were shot and killed inside a clothing store on the 2200 block of Lincoln Boulevard in the early afternoon.

The following month, outraged residents took to the streets for a candlelight vigil organized by de la Torre to protest the violence. That same month Lares, then a field representative for former state senator Tom Hayden and founder of the Santa Monica chapter of Barrios Unidos, had brokered a peace treaty between the warring Santa Monica and Culver City gangs that had been implicated in the four fatal shootings.

Osca de la Torre	Manuel Lares

Santa Monica High School Class of 1991

Childhood friends and public school classmates, Lares and de la Torre had witnessed first hand the madness of gang life. De la Torre recalls the Pico Neighborhood of his youth as a place wracked by crack cocaine, which became widely available in the 1980s.

"Crack cocaine destroyed the neighborhood," said de la Torre. "Either you were addicted to the money or addicted to the drug."

Lares recalled years of walking down the street in fear that he might be killed in an area where residents existed instead of lived.

"The neighborhood was, like, to me the only thing I knew," Lares said. "There was a lot of violence, a lot of scary nights being on the street. You were susceptible to the streets. There were things done to me and my property. I had to survive… My thing was trying to get to the next stage. I was trying to figure out how to survive."

De la Torre found support in several programs aimed at helping young people, including the John Rossi Support Center, a privately funded organization that closed in 1989 following Rossi's death. "He helped me a lot," de la Torre said.

In their senior year at Santa Monica High School, de la Torre and Lares became active in Youth in Action (formerly Kid City), a City-funded outreach program designed to give young people a voice, support and mentorship.

The program worked. The city's older, disenfranchised youth began speaking out, actively challenging a teen curfew promoted by the Santa Monica Police Department and approved by the City Council. The group produced a newsletter, which in one issue discussed, among other things, condom use.

But within two years, the City cut off funding. Youth in Action was dead.

"It wasn't closed down right away," said Lares, one of the program's first youth mentors. "It was slowly dismantled, kind of like this fiasco we're in right now. There were a lot of empty windows and a lot of false promises."

De la Torre, a passionate and intense man, helped plan Youth in Action while he served as SAMOHI's student body president in 1990, the first Latino to hold the elected position since 1948. But it was Lares, who reaped many of the benefits.

"Manny ended up participating [in Youth in Action] more than I did," de la Torre said. "I went off to college."

At Chico State, de la Torre -- whose older brothers and sisters had dropped out of school -- studied politics and as a senior was elected as that school's first Latino student body president. A master's degree in political affairs at the University of Texas at Austin followed, along with an offer to work on higher education policy for the Texas legislature.

But instead of jumping at the chance de la Torre came back to Santa Monica and the Pico Neighborhood, taking a position as an outreach specialist at his alma mater through the school district's Alliance Program, which offers outreach to SAMOHI students. He left the position at the end of the 1999/2000 school year to focus full-time on Proyecto Adelante.

While de la Torre was in college, Lares quit SMC and received a hands on education organizing programs to serve youth in housing projects throughout Los Angeles County. A straight talker, Lares cites two key events as "epiphanies" that led him to try to raise up the community he grew up in.

One day as a high school student, Lares got into an argument with a police officer in class. The cop demanded to know why Lares had to "live like that." A livid Lares in turn questioned the officer about his lifestyle. The argument left Lares railing against the system -- and himself. He started organizing.

Not long after that "something happened and I had to create a relationship with someone from a different neighborhood that I didn't like," he said. "We were able to mediate with the four warring gangs in West L.A. We were able to call it quits on all life-taking acts… Between '92 and '98 a lot of people's lives were saved.

"I [realized] I didn't have to turn my back on my neighborhood," Lares said. "That transitioned me from a person who caused chaos to someone who caused peace."

Today Lares heads the Santa Monica chapter of Barrios Unidos (United Neighborhoods), a national organization that works to keep kids out of gangs through job training and activities. Unlike the two other groups in the collaborative Santa Monica Barrios Unidos was established four years before the City's request for proposal process and receives money from a number of private foundations.

Although he lived in the same neighborhood and attended the same high school, Ed Bell grew up in the Pico Neighborhood during an earlier more peaceful time. Bell won't tell you how old he is, but he will tell you that life in the Pico Neighborhood was different when he was coming up.

"It never came to the point of deadly force of people shooting each other," the former SAMOHI football player recalled.

Tall, muscular and affable Bell remembers more options being offered to the young people in his neighborhood. Like de la Torre, Bell participated in programs offered by the John Rossi Center, and many of his friends took part in the city-funded Cedar Program, which placed teens in city jobs. While Bell did not take part in the program, as an adult he landed a job with the City's Water Department.

But if life was less violent, the former Santa Monica College student also recalls that it wasn't easy. "I didn't grow up with a silver spoon in my mouth," Bell said. "I came up from the bottom."

Bell's mother was single and worked two jobs to support Ed and his sister. "She never missed work. She had a great impact on me," Bell said. "I ended up buying my own home. Now she doesn't work."

When Bell was 18, his mother introduced him to the Santa Monica Christian Center. She asked him to attend the church for one month. If he didn't like it, he never needed to go again.

Bell is now a deacon and president of the board of directors of the church, which Pico Collaborative used as its headquarters.

It was in the spacious downstairs room of the church on Pico Boulevard that Bell first met de la Torre. The men brought together the families of two teenage boys - one black and one Latino -- who had been involved in a shooting.

Months later they would join Lares and 28 other representatives of service agencies vying for a planning grant offered by the City to bring programs to the older youth of the Pico Neighborhood.