Road Scholar: Club med

CAR CLUB RIVALRIES NOT A FACTOR IN LOWRIDER SHOOTOUT

By Newt Briggs

Local lowrider and filmmaker Jim Brown is a proud member of the One Luv car club, but at 9 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 11, in the parking lot at the corner of Rancho Drive and Washington Avenue, there was anything but love in the air. About 10 minutes earlier, a peaceful gathering of as many as 500 lowriders and friends had erupted into a flurry of gunfire. Brown dove beneath his car when the shooting began and emerged to discover that the vehicle had been hit in the quarter panel by a stray bullet.

"You didn't hear any buildup to the shooting," says Brown, who has directed and produced several documentary films about West Coast lowriders. "You didn't hear any arguing or anything. Shooting just broke out, and next thing you know, everybody started pulling out guns and trying to protect themselves. It was like the Wild West. It was stupid, man, real stupid."

Six people were wounded in the melee--three of them fatally--which happened after the annual Lowrider Magazine Super Show at Cashman Field. In the end, Metro Police investigators recovered more than 85 spent rounds from the scene, and as Brown notes, "that's just what fell on the ground." The story made the cover of the following day's Las Vegas Sun, and although no suspects were apprehended, rumors began to circulate that the violence was the spillover from a deadly rivalry between local car clubs. In an Oct. 12 story in the Review-Journal, Metro Lt. Tom Monahan said, "It's entirely possible that it was rival car clubs." The following day, a story ran in the Sun under the headline, "Car club rivalries may have led to deaths."

Brown was shocked.

"The press has gotten it all wrong," he says. "It was strictly gangs--period. I don't know if it was the news or the police or whatever, but they somehow got it in their heads that it was the car clubs. One newspaper even said it was a drive-by. I was like, `Where the hell are they getting this information from?' The shooters were standing on the ground aiming at each other. The only driving was people trying to get the hell up out of there."

Although Sheriff Bill Young initially speculated that the three victims had gang ties, it has since been revealed that 26-year-old Jorge Rojas was a mechanic and innocent bystander who had come to the parking lot to watch an informal competition between hydraulic-powered lowriders known as a hop. According to Francisco Franco, president of the Las Vegas chapter of the UCE car club, lowriders frequently gather in the area because of its central location and relative distance from residential housing. Although he admits that hops often attract a bad element, he too was surprised by the finger-pointing at the car clubs.

"We basically get together twice a month," Franco says, adding that the clubs regularly gather for fundraisers and toy drives. "We were just as concerned as everyone else. We lost a guy who could have been any single one of us, and then on top of that, we got blamed for it. Those two particular gangs would have shot each other whether it was a Tuesday night at Albertson's or a Sunday night at a car show. It had absolutely nothing to do with the cars or the car clubs or anything of that nature."

Nevertheless, Brown says the incident has had reverberations throughout the lowrider community. "There were a lot of people with lowriders who were saying that they were going to sell their cars and go get Harleys. It was a mess."