Maimed Brothers Flee San Francisco Violence

Skull flap replaced, Devron moved out to Sacramento to rehab at his father's house, and he started community college. He thought maybe he could be a physical therapist for football players. Lela and her sons finally tired of crashing at her friend's house and returned to Sunnydale Avenue. Once when Devron came to visit, he ran into B-Low.

Lela didn't need any convincing. She called the slew of housing authorities outside of San Francisco that she'd applied to years back, but none had openings. With monster hospital bills from Devron's stays, she had no means by which to escape. So Lela returned to work. Tomone joined the basketball team at Wallenberg Traditional High School, and life on Sunnydale returned to its familiar rhythms.

Still, Lela was desperate to get away from the valley. Gone was the old assurance that she could enjoy the neighborhood's good, and close her door on the bad. Her family had been violated by senseless violence once, and Lela couldn't relax until Tomone was inside for fear that it would happen again.

Then, it did.

Devron had persuaded Tomone to go break his $5 bill at the corner store so Devron could take the bus to a dance he'd been invited to on Feb. 10, 2006. The Little Village Market sat just two blocks away, but that was Sunnydale projects turf, so the brothers and a couple of Tomone's friends hiked the four blocks to Sun Valley Dairy Liquor & Food Mart, cutting through a park with basketball courts as dusk enveloped the valley.

When the boys weren't in the house when Lela returned from work after 6 p.m., she rang Tomone. They were already on their way back, he said. Less than a minute later, Devron called back. Someone was shooting, he yelled. Tomone's lying on the basketball court and can't say anything.

As the paramedics came and cut the shirt off Tomone, Lela saw the two nickel-sized bullet holes in his back. After the hours-long marathon surgery at General during which Tomone almost bled to death on the operating table, the doctor detailed the path of destruction: the slugs had torn through his spleen, blew through one kidney and ripped the other one in half, pierced his colon three times, and left a gaping hole in the liver. With so much damage, his life was on the brink. If he did live, he probably wasn't going to walk. A bullet had bored through his spinal cord.

Lela walked through the hospital halls alone, weeping.

After weeks of sedation to let his insides heal, Tomone was transferred to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center's rehabilitation facility at the end of March. The 14-year-old learned how to get in and out of a wheel chair. Lela quit her job and moved into Mable's house in Pittsburg.

Paying for private insurance was steadily eating through her $22,000 life savings and retirement. Finally, disability checks kicked in. Diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder. The soldier's disease. Lela's confident charisma had withered, she'd rarely initiate a conversation, and sometimes only answer questions with a "yes" or "no." Planning the details of Mable's upcoming wedding distracted her during the day, and she would watch TV throughout the night.

"You don't want to see your friend in pain like that," Mable says. "We always say things happen for a reason, but do we really believe that?"

Returning to the city wasn't an option. After months of sleeping on Mable's floor, Lela received a forwarded letter: The San Joaquin Housing Authority, which she had applied to years earlier, had an opening. Neighbors packed up her remaining things in the old apartment and the family moved to Stockton in August, part of the steady trickle of families that's taken the city's black population from 13 percent of the its dwellers in 1970 to roughly 7 percent as of 2005, and has officials scrambling to halt the tide. "We're here to help the families take back their communities," says Sgt. Kevin Knoble, a gang task force officer who patrols the valley. "They shouldn't have to be leaving the community to be safe." Lela had fought for the neighborhood for over a decade, but "I've seen and heard so much. I was just tired," Lela says.

Tired of the fear embedded in her psyche, tired of thinking that it seemed more peaceful everywhere other than the city streets that plunged two of her kids into the shadow of death, Lela and her sons were finally out of San Francisco for good.