from Barbed Wire The story made the evening news that day. Eighteenyear-old Marvin Laguan had been shot more than six times while talking to his girlfriend in the 400 block of North Mar Vista Avenue in Pasadena, California. He died almost instantly. Friends, some former gang members, gathered around a candlelit memorial for the next several days. Young men who would otherwise play the tough guy role embraced and sobbed over the site of Laguan’s murder. About 42 miles away at the Pepperdine School of Law, then second-year law student Tracey Brown Fouché (JD ’12) heard the news. A somewhat unlikely friendship had blossomed between Fouché and Laguan after the two met when Fouché taught a Bible Study course at Camp David Gonzales in Calabasas. It was the youth correctional
facility Laguan once called home for a criminal sentence he received as a minor. The news brought tears to Fouché’s eyes. Memories of her time with Laguan immediately rushed through her mind. First his reluctance to even attend Bible study in the first place. Then the walls he put up that made it hard to communicate with him. Then the transformation Fouché witnessed over the course of several months—a transformation that allowed Laguan to open up and want to better his life. When Laguan was released from Camp Gonzales in the spring of 2011, Fouché promised to keep in touch. She kept that promise, occasionally checking in and getting updates about how Laguan had moved away from the gang-infested neighborhood he was living in and found work with Homeboy Industries, a job training program in Los Angeles led by Father Greg Boyle. He seemed to be on the right track. Then came that day in Pasadena in August 2011. A life on the mend ended in an instant. “Marvin’s story gives urgency to our message,” Fouché said of her work in teaching the Bible study course at Camp Gonzales.
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It Started with a Flyer Camp Gonzales and Camp Kilpatrick were never really on Fouché’s radar. But in the fall of 2010 she was approached by classmate Jessie Johnston (JD ’11) who read a flyer that was hanging in the atrium of the School of Law. That flyer had been posted by Peter Depew, now a third-year law student, who was searching for student volunteers at both locations. A Bible study course, specifically at a juvenile detention facility, was an ironic choice for the then 30-year-old Depew. As a teenager growing up in Sylmar, California, Depew used to race his souped-up cars in front of the city’s Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Facility, one of the largest of its kind in the United States. “When you’re young, sometimes that kind of recklessness—taking chances—is tempting,” Depew said. The reality of it was that some of the faces in Nidorf were familiar to Depew— friends and acquaintances he knew from his childhood. “I had one friend in jail, one with warrants, and one dead,” he said. But Depew’s life had turned out differently. His parents made the conscious
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