Gang Warfare Kills ‘Good Kid’ : Victim: Eusebio Arteaga, 16, steered clear of the <i> cholos</i> in his tough Anaheim neighborhood. However, police believe his death was a pay-back shooting.

ANAHEIM — His was not an easy path, but he chose it anyway.

When he realized, at the age of 12, that schools in his hometown of Huitzuco, Mexico, couldn’t prepare him for college, Eusebio Elizalde Arteaga decided to leave his mother and father and go to the United States. However, he told his parents that he, their fifth-born, the youngest, would make them proud. He said he would come home with a college degree someday. He would be the first in the family to do so. You’ll see, he told them. Just wait.

When the inevitable happened, when the pressure to run with the gangs that ruled his neighborhood came, he resisted. He studied. Played soccer. Baby-sat. Anything to steer clear of the cholos . And he told the kids in the neighborhood to do the same: Make something of yourselves. Be strong.

But there’s always a risk for those who dare to dream their way out of Anaheim’s Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood, where a youngster will find misery behind every bend. As it turns out, the one they called “ amigo de los ninos “--friend of the children--won’t be going to college. Or home. Or anywhere.

While he was walking home from a 50th birthday party for a close family friend last Sunday morning, somebody drove up, yelled, “Hey!” and fired a gun repeatedly, striking 16-year-old Eusebio from behind. Wheezing against fate, he whispered, “Can you help me?” to his older brother, Arturo, who, cradling him in his arms, couldn’t.

Officially, Eusebio was the 152nd homicide victim in Orange County this year. The 24th in Anaheim alone. And the sixth to die in a frenzy of gang-related violence that, all told, has left nine dead and 10 injured in Orange County in the last 96 hours.

While those numbers have staggered the county, they bring a collective shrug to Jeffrey-Lynne’s 4,000 residents, to whom shootouts and midnight runs to the trauma center have become commonplace.

Still, Eusebio’s death has touched a well of usually untapped emotions in many of Jeffrey-Lynne’s residents, who rarely ask “who” let alone “why.”

But now they are asking: Why him?

“Eusebio didn’t do nothing bad to nobody,” said Ruffo Benitez, 23, whose two sons, Juan Luis, 2, and Mario, 4, often played with Eusebio. “He came here to have a better life, to . . .” His voice trails off.

Born in Huitzuco, just northeast of Acapulco, Eusebio left his parents, sister and two of his brothers in 1989 to live with an older brother, Arturo; his wife, Elideth, and their two children. They shared a one-bedroom apartment near Disneyland. It was cramped, but it worked.

Eusebio went to nearby Loara High School, where he excelled at, of all things, economics. Just before his death, in fact, he returned from school one day elated over the results of a test he had taken in economics. He had gotten 73 right out of 75.

“He was so happy,” his sister-in-law said. “Education was very important to him. He was planning to go to Cypress College next year.”

Between studies, soccer and basketball, the tall, lanky youngster gladly pitched in with baby-sitting duties for his niece and nephew. He could often be seen playing kick ball or shooting hoops with children half his age.

“He was a nice person with the kids,” said Benitez, who works long hours at Disneyland and said he appreciated the example Eusebio set for his boys.

Eusebio wanted nothing to do with the local Jeffrey Street gang or their chief rivals in northern Anaheim, the Optional Boys. “He stayed away from the cholos ,” Benitez said.

Eusebio hadn’t decided what he wanted to do when he grew up, family members say. But he knew he needed “a good career” to escape the poverty that entangles so many of his neighbors, whose quest for freedom and the good life so often falls short.

“All he wanted was to improve his life,” said Teri Rivera, who runs the Jeffrey-Lynne Neighborhood Center. “He was a very respectable boy. You could almost set your watch by him. He was here like clockwork every day to shoot baskets.”

Until Monday.

That’s when people began coming into the community center, asking Rivera, “Why Eusebio?”

“And what can you tell them?” Rivera said. “I have no answers.”

Neither do the police.

With no eyewitness accounts and little to go on, Anaheim Police Lt. Vince Howard said investigators can only speculate that the 1 a.m. drive-by attack on Jeffrey Street was a possible pay-back by the Optional Boys. About a week before, Howard said, three brothers associated with the Optional Boys were gunned down--one of them fatally--in a drive-by shooting in north Anaheim. Police speculate members of the Optional Boys may have paid a visit to Jeffrey Street on Sunday in retaliation.

When they saw Eusebio walking with his brother, they fired.

Eusebio “was just an innocent bystander,” Howard said, “but that doesn’t matter. They see somebody about the right age, they assume it’s a gang member.

“It makes you feel bad . . . here a good kid gets it.”

There isn’t much to go around in this community, but Eusebio’s classmates and neighbors have all chipped in to help send his body back to his hometown in Mexico to be buried. The family has kept a list of everyone’s contribution:

Francisco $1.

Sergio $2.

Zoccorro $10.

And so on.

“A lot of people have helped,” Benitez said.

To spare Eusebio’s huge cast of young friends from the grief of his death, parents tried to shield their children from the news. But there are no secrets here, it seems.

When Benitez opened up the newspaper one day this week and Eusebio’s picture was there, his 2-year-old son instantly recognizing him, molded his hand into the shape of a pistol, said, “Pow! Pow!” and slowly dropped his head to his shoulder, playing dead.

“I wanted to keep their minds clean,” said Benitez, shaking his head, “but they know. They know everything.”

For now, friends and neighbors meet in Eusebio’s apartment every night at 6:30 p.m. to say prayers. In accordance with their religious tradition, they do this eight consecutive nights, and on the ninth day--Monday--Eusebio’s soul will be set free.