Robert Gonzalez Medina liked to tease his mother. Whenever gunshots were fired at their home, he would cry out, “Mom! Mom! They hit me!”
Mother was a good sport, and she played along with Robert’s game.
“Oh no!” she said every time. “What will we do?”
But the gang violence was no joking matter. Robert grew up in a violent Los Angeles neighborhood. When he was 5 years old, his older brothers joined a street gang. People from other gangs drove by their house and shot at it, trying to scare his brothers.
“For me, the shooting was normal,” Robert said. “I took it as a game.”
The constant violence, however, caused the boy’s heart to become hard. As he grew older, he stopped teasing his mother. His smile was replaced by an angry scowl. He began to play with real guns.
When Robert was 14, his parents were joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Robert sometimes went to church with them, and they talked about the sermon around the dinner table.
Even though he acted like a tough guy, Robert grew tired of the violence. He married a woman from Mexico and decided to go to Mexico to meet her family.
Robert liked the quieter life in Mexico, and he opened a store selling construction materials.
