Sunset on a Murder

St. Cecilia's pastor, Monsignor Michael Harriman, says he never knew Ramirez to be anything but polite and responsible. Gomez's mother, Pat, laughs at the newspaper's description of her son being in "a gang." She has, she says, "no idea where they got that from." Lt. Murphy of the SFPD gang task force says that Ramirez's friends and SDI before them, despite what the papers reported, were not and never had been considered gangs by his department. "They were just drunk idiots," says Murphy in describing SDI.

But what parents, teachers, and law enforcement weren't willing to admit, the Sunset kids themselves knew. There was something seriously wrong with their community, and by the time Ramirez died, it was too late to address it.

"I care about those guys a lot. When I went away to college, I was concerned for their welfare," says former St. Cecilia's student Debbie Ribera. "It's definitely been a tradition in our neighborhood that there's a certain kind of person that's like a male role, that the popular kids sometimes are expected to fill. I know it started a long time ago. I don't know if it's still going on today."

She need not wonder. In June 2003, a group of five Chinese-American teens were, according to court testimony, jumped by a group of white kids in the Sunset. One of the victims, a former student at the private Drew High School named Paul Wong, said he and his friends were going to get some dessert at J.T.'s Diner at 19th and Taraval the evening after high school graduation when they were accosted by two white males. Unprovoked, one of the whites poured beer over one of Wong's friends' head, called the Asian boys "dumb Chinamen," and then began to punch the beer-soaked student. Suddenly, according to Wong, approximately 20 Caucasian boys encircled them, and when Wong and one of his friends tried to escape, two followed and one began to punch Wong in the face.

When the police arrived, all the white kids scattered, except for two. Wong identified one of them as the boy who had punched him. He was a student at Sacred Heart. The case, in which the boy (a juvenile) has been charged with five counts of felony assault with hate crime enhancements, is being litigated.