Someone to say no

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat Mary Fan

He was shot six times in the front, seven in the back during a burglary he committed with his compadre, Jody Jose Marquez.

Caesar was 19. Jody, 35.

Jody had a prior record - including a second degree murder conviction in 1997 for a southside shootout, apparently drug-related, where one was killed, two injured and 50 shells spewed from various weapons.

Caesar had no record.

Caesar rode with Jody to the woods at Midvale Park Apartments where the two allegedly beat a man until he urinated in his pants before the man managed to grab an 18-millimeter and shoot Caesar 13 times.

Jody fled, unharmed.

But in a twist of poetic justice, Jody Jose Marquez is on trial for first degree murder in Caesar's death though not one of the bullets buried in Caesar came from his gun. This is courtesy of a twist in Arizona felony law that says if Jody drove Caesar to the apartments knowing that Caesar would be robbing the man, he is culpable for the death.

But that's law.

Here's the justice, poignantly evident in Caesar's father, Arnulfo Leon's words: "My son never had a record until this man got him into this."

Arnulfo took leave from work to attend every day of Marquez's six-week trial.

In today's cry-to-my-troubled-neighborhood days, some may argue the denouement was inevitable the instant Jody Jose Marquez and Caesar Leon met. It is expected that two kids growing up crushed under the burden of economics and race, fixed under unspoken society-sanctioned oppression they cannot escape, should have justified explosive anger building up. Simmering under the burden of history.

Such would be the argument of the most well-intentioned liberals. And they'd be wrong.

There is explosive rage seething in everyone and in every place. Where some are lucky is having someone brave enough to say no.

This is as true for some lily-white-scrubbed rich kid in a nice neighborhood as it is for five black kids growing up in the racially and economically explosive powderkeg of Los Angeles.

The latter example I take from personal experience.

A few weeks ago, I went walking in LA. It was late at night. I had come to LA with several others but I was too young to go drinking with the rest so I went for a walk.

And I was the Asian girl, walking alone along a dark narrow ribbon of sidewalk under a highway underpass, and they were the five black teens heading toward me on the same narrow sidewalk.

And this was LA, where, during the riots, many blacks - angry at an incident of a Korean shop owner killing a black girl - went after Asians.

And as we were passing next to each other one of the boys planted himself before me on the narrow sidewalk and grabbed my arm, yelling something I couldn't decipher, his face, centimeters away from mine.

Now you could say circumstances. You could say racial and economic tension and you could say I was damned dumb to be walking there in the first place.

But what the shortest of the five said was much more meaningful.

"Hey man, stop it. What are you doing? Why are you trying to scare the girl?"

And they passed and he passed after getting my name and telling me to be careful. And that's all.

There are explosions everywhere, slow smolderings that are much less justified. On this campus, in white-hate against minorities, minority-hate against whites, and gay-bashing which we see even in letters to the editor.

We see the extremes of wrong and shrug it off as something that happens elsewhere, but in truth the potential for an explosion is in each of us.

And the thin barrier from crossing over? Someone to say no or someone to whisper yes, yes, yes. Drive us on over.

And the heroes are those who say no.

Mary Fan is a molecular and cellular biology senior. Her column, Skyfall, appears every Thursday and she can be reached via e-mail at Mary.Fan@wildcat.arizona.edu.