OREGON, Feb 27 — Mary Thompson was your average mother in early 1990s Eugene, Oregon. She was a community organiser and upstanding citizen... by day. By night? She was “Gang Mom.” Living the ultimate double life, Thompson ran a gang of teenagers—including her own son—who terrorised the unsuspecting city with drugs and violence. When a fellow gang member named Aaron Iturra was suspected of snitching on Thompson’s son, Beau, she mercilessly put a hit on him. Fred Rosen’s Gang Mom gives an inside look into the true story of a mother who would do anything—even murder—to protect her son and keep her gang empire alive.
Read on for an excerpt of Gang Mom.
Mary Thompson had exploded on the Eugene scene like a comet in the night sky. She had lived in anonymity for years, she said, but when organised gangs first came to Eugene in 1991, she decided to take action.
Her son Beau had been seduced by the power of gangs. A small, tousle-haired kid, he looked innocent enough to be in one of those milk ads. But Beau was hardly an innocent. Barely 13 years old, he helped form the 74 Hoover Crips, taking the gang name “Bishop,” and subsequently served time in the MacLaren Juvenile Facility for gang-related crimes.
Instead of fretting like most would, Mary Thompson became an anti-gang activist. Her message was simple: “If it could happen to my family, it could happen to yours.”
She began conducting anti-gang seminars at high schools and youth centres, where she spoke passionately to teenagers of the good life her son Beau gave up, of her pain in watching him go down the wrong road. She showed students her photo albums filled with heartwarming shots of Beau proudly wearing his Cub Scout uniform, fishing with his father, and opening presents on Christmas Day like any normal American kid. But he wasn’t any normal American kid, Mary said, not since he got involved with gangs.
Instead of the scenes depicted in the photographs, in her mind’s eye she saw Beau selling guns at a local ice cream shop, serving time in prison, and threatening cops with a revolver. She saw a boy who, ever since he became “Bishop,” had a gaze as hard as glacial ice and a heart frozen with hate for authority.
As her stature in the community increased, so did her influence. She formed a close relationship with the police department. Law enforcement looked to Mary as the one person who could break the spell that gangs cast over the city’s youth. She formed a close working relationship with Ric Raynor, a detective in the anti-gang unit. Eventually, the department appointed her to the newly formed Gang Prevention Task Force.
Like the best evangelists, Mary could spellbind a crowd with the emotion behind her words, her commitment to keeping Eugene gang-free, her zeal in allowing the city’s children to keep their childhood pristine. And Mary vowed publicly to continue to pursue her cause, to break the hold of gangs in Eugene, to stop kids from joining them, as long as one breath remained in her body.
The wind came whistling in through the window of the back bedroom, where Janyce Iturra lay sleeping. Despite the weather, Janyce always slept with her windows open. She liked the feeling of fresh air around her. She worked hard during the day, as a receiving clerk at Fred Myers, a large department store. And since she usually went to work at four or five, she was in bed by nine.
When the phone rang at ten, it woke her up. She heard her daughter Maya go out to get Aaron because the phone call was for him. After he came back in, she heard him say:
“Well, who is it, Maya?”
“I don’t know,” Maya answered. “It was just a girl. She hung up.”
Janyce drifted back to sleep.
Minutes later, 17-year-old “Crazy” Joe Brown stood in front of the Iturra home. The house was a panhandle, situated in back of another, the two connected by a narrow alley. The beauty of it was, you couldn’t see the panhandle house from the street. This type of dwelling was common in Eugene.
Brown was a short kid who, at five-foot-six, weighed all of 140 pounds soaking wet. Dressed in black shirt and pants, with jet-black hair, scraggly moustache and goatee, he cased the joint. Quickly, he realized he had come too early. The house was lit up. People inside were still awake. He left and returned around midnight.
This time, the house was dark. He tapped the glass of the living-room window several times just to be sure. When no one answered, he walked back to the far end of the alley where Jim Elstad crouched in the darkness.
“Iturra’s asleep,” he whispered, the cool night air making his breath come out in a white plume.
Elstad nodded and followed Brown back to the house. Both boys were dressed in the gang colors: blue bandannas over their faces and heads, blue bandannas covering their hands. Their gang leader had told Elstad and Brown that the open display of their gang colours was a symbol that someone was going to get killed. This was ritualized behaviour. Dressing in this manner signified this as a Crip event, a Crip killing. Their gang leader had assured them that their “brother” Crips in Portland and Los Angeles would soon know about their work.
They lifted the door of the garage, and found themselves standing before a bedroom that had been partitioned off by sheet rock in the rear. Brown pushed at the door of the makeshift room.
Clothes, beer bottles, soda cans and empty pizza boxes were strewn all over the floor. On a small dresser made of cheap pressed wood were various types of shaving lotion and high school loose-leaf binders filled to bursting. There was also an old console colour TV set.
Two of the walls were decorated with posters celebrating Motley Crue, Menace II Society and Budweiser beer. There were pictures of two attractive young women dressed in low-cut outfits revealing their cleavage. The two other walls of the bedroom were covered in graffiti.
And there on the bed was the target, Aaron Iturra, sleeping arm in arm with his girlfriend Carrie Barkley.
Brown shook Aaron’s bare back. The teenager continued to slumber, but then Brown saw Iturra move his head a little bit, and start to get up. By then, Jim Elstad was at the door, holding a.45 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver in his right hand. Steadying it with his left, Elstad raised the weapon.
Brown reached down to the girl’s purse, which sat on the floor amid the litter of the beer bottles and pizza cartons. He reached in and took out a pack of cigarettes, which he pocketed, then stood up and to the side.
A few houses away, Jack and Cameron were visiting Angel. They were hanging out like they always did, smoking cigarettes, Angel doing so despite the fact that she was pregnant. They were talking about scams when they heard a loud pop.
“F—!” Angel exclaimed.
“Was that it?” Jack asked.
“That was it!” Cameron confirmed.
A neat, red hole had materialized in the back of Aaron Iturra’s head. Iturra slumped back down, the mattress suddenly turning a dark red. Carrie came awake instantly and screamed, “Help me, somebody come and help me.” Elstad and Brown turned and ran. Soon, they were back on the street and Elstad turned to Brown.
“I can’t believe it. I shot that muthaf—er in the back of the head,” he said with a great big smile. — Reuters
* This story was originally featured on The-Line-Up.com. The Lineup is the premier digital destination for fans of true crime, horror, the mysterious, and the paranormal.
