Walking up to the white Ford Explorer parked in the drive-thru order lane of Carl's Jr. on San Gabriel Boulevard in Rosemead, 20-year-old Alex Carpio recognized the young men inside the four-door truck. They were his enemies from a nearby rival gang. He had even beaten some of them up in high school.
It was around 10 o'clock on an early October night in 1994. He and his homies had been across the street at St. Anthony Church's carnival and gotten kicked out because they were recognized as gang-bangers with their baggy pants, shaved heads and tattoos. So they decided to go over to the fast-food restaurant to meet some girls.
"Where are you guys from? Where are you from?" he kept asking the young men in the front seat, hoping to get them angry enough to get out of the truck. He tried to open the door, but it was locked.
Then he noticed the dude in the back seat staring at him. He asked him the same question, but again got no response. So he raised up on his tip-toes and leaned inside the back open window, "disrespecting" him even more.
When the guy came up from the floor with a handgun, it was so close to Carpio's face he could almost kiss the barrel. He kept staring at his wide-open eyes and noticed how hard his enemy was shaking as he cocked the pistol.
After a moment, he said to himself, Damn, if I run, I'm gonna be known as a punk, a nobody, you know. And then my own friends will kill me because they have the same gangster mentality as me.
So shouting, "Las Lomas!" - his gang's moniker - he lunged towards the guy, trying to grab the gun. But the gangster jerked backwards, firing.
Carpio heard the wicked blast, felt a red-hot poker inside his skull. The bullet went through one side of his skull, took out his eyes and exited just under the opposite eye socket. "When I got shot, I saw myself dead on the ground, with my right eye hanging on my check and my left eye popping out of my eye socket," he remembers all-too-clearly today.
"I experienced death. They brought me back on life support. But I experienced death, and I'd seen one of my best friends, 'Gordo,' who had got killed two months before: August 4, 1994. He was my best friend, and I had just buried him. And I saw some of my enemies who I knew were already dead, too."
In the Pasadena hospital, he couldn't see or even speak because of a hole in his throat that was still open. He could form the words in his mind, that wasn't a problem. But when he seemed to say them, his mother and some of his nine brothers and sisters just kept on talking to each other like they hadn't heard him. He also cried out to the nurse about the horrendous pain he was in, but she didn't pay any attention, either.
"I was never afraid of anything until that day I died," Carpio confides in a different voice. "I can honestly say I was scared. I could hear my own self, but nobody else could hear me. I was pretty messed up because I'd ask and ask, 'Where am I?'
"I thought I was in hell, to be honest with you. I mean, I had just seen my dead best friend and I'd seen my dead enemies. They didn't have no bullet wounds on their faces and their bodies. And my friend got shot in the chest three times.
"So I'm like, 'God, I'm going crazy,'" he says, shaking his head. "I honestly thought that I'm in hell."
Jumping out of cars
Alex Carpio says his father was a "gangster and mobster" who would pull him out of kindergarten and elementary school to go on frequent trips to Mexico, near the state of Jalisco. Antonio would have his young son carry and hide his gun so the local police wouldn't find it. When his dad needed to do some business, he would come back and say, "Mijo, give me the gun." A little while later, sometimes the boy would hear shots being fired off in the distance.
By 13, he was tired of missing so much school and falling behind. He and his friends started hanging around together more, getting tight by sharing horror stories about how badly they were treated at home. They got "so big" that members of the local gang took notice and asked them, "Why don't you guys become Las Lomas? You know, you're fighting the same gang members that we're fighting."
At first, Alex resisted, telling them, "I don't need to come from a gang to be what I am." But after awhile, the adolescent figured they had a point - He was battling their enemies, so why not join them? He gained their respect fast with his in-your-face bravado, but also ticked off some homeboys for rising so quickly.
"I was jumping out of cars with a gun in my hand," he reports matter of factly. "There were no drive-bys. It was getting out of that car and doing what you gotta do."
There were scrapes with the law, too, and stays in juvenile hall. His longest time away as a minor was eight months in Camp Mendenhal by Magic Mountain. He says they got him on assault with a deadly weapon - his fist - when he was 16. At 19, he dropped out of high school altogether when other kids started making fun of him because he still couldn't read or write.
His older brother, Manuel, got him a job on a construction site. He was making good money for back then, $1,800 a month, but Alex couldn't stay away from his homies. After work, he'd rush home, iron his clothes and head straight to Rosemead.
"It was like a disease to me - it was an addiction," he explains, hunching his shoulders and holding up his palms. "I mean, it was so bad that I couldn't stay away from my gang. My family had moved to West Covina, but I would go back to Rosemead. I had real close, close friends, and I used to go out of my way for my friends to help them out.
"For me, gangbanging was a rush," he reports. "It's crazy to explain it, but it was a rush. It's just the respect that you got. I mean, my own homeboys feared me. I was somebody really respected, but at the same time really hated. When I was out there gang-banging, I made my gang known as 'The hills kill for thrills.'" (In English, Los Lomas means the hills.)
Alex felt fearless. All that changed into a nightmare on Oct. 8, 1994, in the parking lot of Carl's Jr., however, when he was shot five times in the head, face, neck and arm, with a bullet lodged in his shoulder surgeons couldn't remove because it was too close to his spinal cord. Amazingly, he not only recovered - gaining back his voice - but returned to gang-banging and selling drugs.
Even his homies thought he was crazy being out on the street, often alone, with a wad of money stuffed in his pockets, packages of crystal meth that he'd measure out with his finger tips and a .357 magnum tucked away in his waist. At times when he got into fist fights or even clipped an enemy with a well-aimed shot, they thought there was no way he could really be blind.
"Everybody thought I was able to see," he says. "My gun was my cane. A lot of people feared me, thinking that I was able to see. I mean, because everything I was doing, it was normal to me. I didn't feel blind. It's hard to explain. I couldn't see them, but I felt them, especially if they were close. It might sound crazy, but it's in my head like a shadow."
'That loco blind guy'
Over almost the next 13 years, Carpio earned a new reputation as that loco blind guy who's still out there gang-banging and dealing dope. There were more stints in jail, this time as an adult. The last, just a couple years ago, cost him seven months behind bars after a high-speed chase that ended with his arrest for possessing a gun along with drugs.
The 33-year-old today says he'd wanted to turn his life around in high school, when he got shot in 1994 and, especially, after his mother, Alvina, died eight years ago. But school counselors, social workers and rehab workers always viewed him as a hardcore gang member who would never change his destructive ways. He reports that even the local Braille institute never "got back to me" after an intake interview went badly when he was directly asked: "Are you a gang member?"
"With my generation, the society judges me by my looks and my criminal record," he notes. "And gang members like me should be in jail the rest of their life. Gang members like us should not be in the streets."
He's survived on $300-a-month disability and by selling drugs.
"I can honestly tell you I just gave it up seven months ago," he says. "I gave up gang-banging because a guy actually believed in a crazy gang member like me. Father Greg Boyle."
He'd heard about the Jesuit who founded and runs Homeboy Industries when he was in jail. But he thought the priest was just one of those high-and-almighty preachers who talks about God all the time.
When he got out, he finally learned how to walk with a real cane and began to read Braille with help from the Foundation for the Junior Blind. The director told him he was a "real motivation" for others and should contact this Father Boyle, which he did.
"I told him my life story," says Carpio, "and he goes, 'Son, how about working for me as a motivational speaker?'
"I go, 'What is a motivational speaker?'
"He goes, 'Son, just tell your story. And guess what? You'll get paid.'
"So I jumped on it."
The former gang-banger, with his likeable demeanor and street-sense of humor, goes out to elementary schools, high schools and even colleges. After introducing himself as "Alex Carpio, motivational speaker for Homeboy Industries," he lays out his 18-year life as an urban gangster.
"I open the kids' eyes as to the real life of a gang member," he says. "You know, I tell them in detail what is a gang member, because I talk about my personal experiences.
"A lot of these kids think gang-banging, it's just kicking back with the homies. That's not gang-banging to me. Gang-banging to me is putting in work for the gang. It was going out there to my enemies and doing what I had to do to let them know that there's only one gang - and that was my gang."
Then he tells them that nothing is worth the physical and mental hell he's gone through, knowing that his blindness speaks a hundred times more powerfully than any of his words. Towards the end, he quips, 'And that's how I went blind at 20.'"
He also mentors 13 "wannabe" gang members at Homeboy Industries' new headquarters at 130 W. Bruno St. in Los Angeles. "I try to guide them and try to teach them to learn from my mistakes," he says. "I go, 'Just because you want to get high and kick back and look cool, you're gonna end up getting shot and messed up."
More than a decade after he was shot, the bullet embedded in his neck still causes it to painfully cramp up and pull to one side.
Never going back
Yet, Carpio, who lives with his girlfriend, Claudia, and her 12-year-old daughter in the San Gabriel Valley, admits he occasionally feels the pull of Las Lomas. He sits back and thinks about moments he had, especially with a couple close friends, and it gives him "a rush" to go back and visit. In fact, he has twice for birthdays. But he swears he didn't drink, and left early after paying his respects.
"Ain't nothing gonna take me back - nothing!" he declares, shaking his head. "But if Father Greg wouldn't have given me this job, honest to God, I would have been out there still. Because I only knew two things: how to sell drugs and how to bang. So I've got so much respect for this guy."
About his former life, the ex-gangster says he only hurt people who were actively gang-banging like himself. He made sure they were his enemies by having them take off their shirt and pants so he could check out their gang tattoos. Towards them he feels nothing. But he does ache deeply for their families, especially the mothers.
When it comes to his life today, Alex Carpio believes God let him live for a reason. "I mean, to throw out there the true facts, the true life of a gang member," he says. "The media are always picturing gang members in a certain way and politicians are always saying, 'We need more cops on the street.'
"And I honestly can say, thank God that Father Greg Boyle is out there helping people like me, you know. And now I'm going out and teaching what nobody could teach me out on the street."
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