Evaristo Salas Jr. (Junior)

So me and my older sister, her name's Debbie, but she's two years older than me.

us two are not we're not our biological dad is our father is not my my stepfather so he took her in and took me in and then you know raised us both and then my younger sister which who is biologically his came a year later so the only one that my mother stayed with was my younger brother and so he raised us three of us pretty much by himself

Yeah, he pretty much raised us, and it was stable.

I mean, we were poor, but we never felt like we were poor.

We were never hungry.

There's always food in the refrigerator, you know, and, you know, our Christmases were, he tried to do as best he could with them, you know, dealing with my mother and all that kind of stuff.

The hard part about it is that, you know, he had to work 12 to 16 hours a day

So that left a lot of idle time on my part.

Yeah.

That, and I was already, like I said, the emotional trauma of, you know, being told this by my mother and the chaos that I dealt with with her basically kind of, you know, sent me and had my mind in a certain way, you know, where I was feeling like there was something missing in my life.

So I was searching, you know.

And that's when, you know, all the gang stuff kind of came in.

You know, it came later when I was about 11 or 12 when the gangs kind of started hitting, you know, this small town, the sunny side of the Hispanic gangs.

Prior to that, the town was kind of, you know, you could... We all got along, we all went to school together, we all knew each other.

But when the gangs came in, like, it was like maybe 87 or 88 or 89, around that time...

Everything, you can see the splits already happening, and the gang violence started kind of taking hold of the community and that kind of stuff, and we kind of just followed all the kids of that era starting to just fall into these different gangs, and it kind of just split and fragmented the community.

Before I knew it, because I hung out with these guys, I had these other guys that were already, and who I knew and went to school with became my enemies almost overnight.

Yeah, that's kind of exactly what happened.

There was like an influx of individuals that came from southern and northern California.

They were escaping the gang violence in the community over there.