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Manuel Correa’s brothers
are thieves, drug users or gang members. His father is in prison, his
mother an alcoholic and recovering heroin addict. He has been shot at
while walking through rival gang turf, exposed to criminal behavior at
home and expelled from a preschool class for cursing his teacher and hitting
other children.
Hardly a good
start for a little boy who seems well on his way down the path of failure
at age 4.
“I ain’t scared
of nothing,” says Manuel, whose gang-style crew cut is growing out.
His mother, Yvonne
Correa, 39, is a hard-drinking ex-heroin addict and former gang member
whose Spurgeon Street apartment is a hangout for her son Marcos, 18, and
other members of the Logan Street gang who use it as a headquarters for
street crime.
“I know they’re
stealing and stuff, but I ain’t got any control over them,” Correa says.
“They’ve already beat me up a few times.”
Manuel is her
inspiration to live and stay off drugs, she says, but she is barely able
to take care of herself, much less him. A former drug dealer and burglar,
she is in constant pain because of liver disease. Yet she refuses to stop
drinking up to a case and a half of beer a day.
“Hey, this is
better than doing heroin, that’s for sure,” she says, smiling and taking
a sip of her light beer at 7:30 a.m.
Two of her other
sons and an HIV-positive man share her tiny studio apartment in the 1400
block of Spurgeon Street. A dozen or so gang members also are there most
of the time, and their influence on Manuel is obvious.
They have given
him a gang nickname, and he freely flashes the Logan sign. He has learned
to sleep through the constant blast of rap music inside the apartment,
and the sounds of gunfire and police sirens outside.
In the morning,
rain or shine, he and his mother ride the bus to a county methadone clinic
for her daily dose. She says she takes Manuel because she is afraid to
leave him with his brothers.
“I don’t know
if they’ll get busted or what,” she says.
The little boy
was handcuffed once, Correa says, when police detained his brothers at
Logan Park several months ago. He also has been on hand when police have
searched his mother’s home for drugs and guns.
“He gets really
scared when the cops come in,” she says. “He always starts crying, ‘Please
don’t take my mommy. ‘”
Laughing, she
adds: “Sometimes, he even starts kicking the cops.”
Correa insists
that she is trying her best to provide for Manuel, saying that she even
hides his milk from gang members.
But she admits
that he probably would have a better life away from her.
“All my children
would probably have had a better chance without me,” she said. “But I
love the little guy. He’s the only thing I got. I can’t imagine life without
him. ”
Staff writer
Jeordan Legon immigrated from Cuba with his family in 1979. He lived for
most of last year in the Courtyard Apartments in the predominantly Hispanic
neighborhood near 15th and Spurgeon streets in Santa Ana.
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