Shotwell softball team, Frank Peña kneeling on right in the early '80s. (Courtesy of Louis Lucero)
Their jerseys said “Shotwell” in bold letters and they posed making “S” shapes with their hands. They were the kids growing up on the 1000 block of Shotwell Street in the ’80s, and it wasn’t “Shotty Block,” like kids call it now. It was the “Shotwell family”—and according to them it wasn’t a gang.
“It was a street with a bunch of really tight families,” said Tony Lucero, who grew up on the block with eight siblings.
When Lucero first met Frank Peña—the new 11-year-old on the block who was a whiz at sports and spoke English with an accent—low-rider culture and the “cholo scene” were big in the neighborhood. Only Lucero’s spit-shine charm could coax Peña’s protective mother, Olga, into letting him out to play. She was from Nicaragua, but she knew that what happened on 24th Street—the guys with headbands, the cars cruising, the girls, the drugs and alcohol—could swallow a boy up, according to family friend Ricardo “Junior” Martinez.
Thirty years later, Peña was still living with her when he was shot at Papa Potrero’s restaurant on 24th Street alongside 26-year-old Francisco “Cisco” Cornejo in September. Police believe the brawl, which started with fists not guns, was Norteño-on-Norteño gang violence.
But Peña wasn’t active in a gang, neighbors and some close to him insist. He’d beaten his demons, they said, such as selling and using crack, which led to scattered county jail stints from 1991 to 2000. He’d created a new life with a full-time job, a newborn son and a girlfriend studying to be a nurse. Kids looked up to him, and neighbors saw him as a gregarious, magnetic family man who had learned to navigate the Mission’s many worlds.
But another close friend—and police reports—indicate that Peña’s involvement with gangs, at least through the 90s, was more significant than neighbors or friends knew or let on.
In recent years, however, friends say Peña’s message to kids was to stay off the street.
“Me and Frank were the ones who stayed on the corner. We were the ones who showed the younger kids how to come up,” said Tony Echevarria, one of Peña’s best friends from childhood, of being a 30-something on the block. “[We] saw it as a special responsibility to keep our way of doing things, our legacy.”
Their way of doing things meant not looking for trouble, and definitely not letting a small argument or fight escalate.
But escalation is just what may have led to the murder of three men that weekend in September, which began with the shooting of 21-year-old Michael Sanchez two days before Peña’s murder.
According to Sergeant Mario Molina, the San Francisco Police Department’s foremost expert on Latino gangs who arrested Peña several times over the years, these kinds of shootings often start over a “personal matter”—minor insults, arguments over girls.
“If there was a turf war, we’d see more bodies,” he said of the murders.
Unraveling exactly why Peña ended up a victim of alleged gang violence may not be clear until the 19-year-old charged with this murder stands trial, but the life and death of Peña, the 41-year-old 49ers fan, offers a glimpse of how difficult escaping one’s past can be.
