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Testimony of Faith, Gabriel Chavoya - Part 1
(Editor’s Note: Brother Chavoya is a dedicated saint in our congregation, faithful as an usher and part of our church sponsored team called ACTS which counsels and provides education to individuals with alcohol and drug dependency. Our ACTS program will be featured in our spring issue. The following testimony expounds the saving mercy of Jesus Christ who can reach down to the Gabriel (center) with his family most hardcore gang member and make him a devoted Christian. Read and be inspired!)
The “homies” needed to hijack a vehicle for a drive-by shooting on a hot, summer night in East Side San Jose. The gang of Hispanic young men walked up to the end of the line of waiting cars in a Jack-in-the-Box fast food eatery. At gunpoint they demanded the young driver to get out of his idling car. He refused so one of the gang members pointed a 12 gauge sawed-off shotgun at his chest and fired. A few days later they were all arrested. Gabriel Chavoya’s older brother was one of the gang members at the crime scene. He did not pull the trigger, but he was convicted as an accessory to murder. Even though he was only 16 years old, he was tried as an adult and sentenced to seven years in prison.
“This was a promise made to himself that he would not keep.” Gabriel was 10 years old when his brother was put away. He had always looked up to his older brother, but at that young age he told himself, “I will never do that kind of stuff. I will learn from this and will not walk in his footsteps.” This was a promise made to himself that he would not keep.
Childhood Struggles
Gabriel says he was born on April Fool’s Day, 1980, at Kaiser Hospital in Santa Clara, California. He was the last of two siblings born to Rosario, a welder, and Elizabeth Chavoya, a housewife. He was raised close to his mother’s parents and family. Growing up, he and his cousins feared their grand
father Charlie because of his gangster lifestyle with a notorious Hispanic gang and a wicked sense of humor. One time when he was nearly 5 years old, Gabriel remembers playing with his cousins at his grandparent’s home when suddenly Grandpa Charlie came after them with a butcher knife. He screamed at them, raising the knife over his head. The children ran out of the house, frightened out of their wits. They ran across the street where Gabriel found his grandmother Margie visiting a neighbor. They told her about Charlie’s horrific threat. She stormed across the street and entered her house, berating him as he chuckled to himself sitting on his lounge chair. Both his father and grandfather abused alcohol and were violent when they were drunk. In contrast, his grandmother and mother had long before been converted to Pentecostalism. They attended church faithfully without their spouses. There was conflict between his parents, especially when his father would come home drunk and verbally, then physically fight with his mother. Being the youngest, Gabriel did not have a bedroom of his own and had to sleep in the living room, so he saw and heard everything. Elizabeth took Gabriel and his brother and sister to church every Sunday. He liked his Sunday school classes, but mostly slept under the pew during worship services. Pastor Moses Guiterrez of Abundant Life Temple Pentecostal Church effectively instilled into him to fear the Lord, but Gabriel admits that he didn’t have much of a prayer life. He attended elementary schools in West San Jose and was a good student. But soon after his brother was locked up, the family moved to East San Jose into the home of his mother’s parents. Gabriel entered the 6th grade at Herbert Hoover Middle School. Most of his cousins had joined the gangs, and at eleven, Gabriel started to hang out with the “homies”. He began to smoke and sell marijuana on the school campus.
Drugs and Gang Violence
By the time he was 13, he had matured quickly and was living a hard-core life of a gang member. Pride and a demand for respect for his gang had him involved with inflicting injuries to rival gang members. His gang could be involved with beatings, stabbings, and even shootings on individuals and their families. At the same time, Gabriel lived in fear, watching his back from a sudden assault or being jumped in retaliation from rival gang members. He admits that the mentality of a gang member is twisted, almost brainwashed to believe that profit for the gang and gaining the upper hand, no matter the legality or morality of the action, is the utmost priority. Gabriel laments that God and what is right and wrong never influenced his behavior during the time he spent with his homies. But at the beginning of the second semester of his freshman year, his family suddenly moved to the small town of Alviso north of Santa Clara, located on the southern shore of the San Francisco Bay. There, at Wilcox High School, Gabriel turned a new leaf. He became involved with the high school marching band, playing the trumpet and keeping his delinquent behavior in check. In fact, Gabriel had been keeping his gang life activities hidden from his parents for quite some time. He was most of the time high on marijuana, making his mother wonder why he was always so sleepy and sluggish. Gabriel was clever selling marijuana on campus on the side, sometimes profiting $200.00 a day. He would spend the cash on weekends still gang banging with his homies, since it was expected that all members followed the code to represent the original origin of your hood no matter where you resided. He confesses that deep down inside he wanted to do what was right and stay out of trouble, but loyalty to the gang dominated his very being. During his sophomore year, a good kid named Gene befriended Gabriel and encouraged him to join the wrestling team. “So I took him up on the offer, since I was always fighting anyway!” He was placed on the team under probation because of his grades. He worked on improving his grade point average with success, and by his junior year he was also on the swim and polo teams. His focus on weekdays was on sports, but on weekends he devoted his time to gang activities. Then he discovered LSD at sixteen. Even though he was “...but the pure adrenalin is what kept us alive!”
fascinated with the hallucinations, he really preferred the high the acid drug produced. One hit could last 42 hours, perfect to indulge for the weekend, but if you drank orange juice during the week, the vitamin C brought back the high. His adrenalin was like a roller coast, for the high could suddenly turn into a bad trip escaping drive-by shootings “and running for our lives!” His gang members would many times challenge each other to “march 30 deep into a rival gang’s hood and rush their houses” just to keep the hostilities going. “Scary!” Gabriel exclaims, “but the pure adrenalin is what kept us alive!” This gang devotion finally affected Gabriel’s performance in school and on the sports teams. He was suspended then expelled from several school districts, once
even threatened to attend continuation high school, until he finally graduated from the fifth high school since his freshman year. During this time, his family was in an upheaval when his mother walked out of her troublesome marriage and literally disappeared for several months. His father went into a panic and even made a missing person’s report with the police. Gabriel felt dejected, especially during his graduation missing his mom. Later, when she returned, she told him she did attend the ceremonies undetected and was so proud of him. “I lived for the high.” For the next seven years, Gabriel sank even lower in his drug abuse, snorting crank and/or crystal methamphetamine, and taking opium, hash and even the dreaded PCP, which he quickly dropped when he heard some of his homies “fried their brains out rather quickly.” Amazingly, he had steady employment working for the Job Corps, getting training in testing electronics and being hired by several Bay Area tech companies. But it was selling drugs on the side that enabled him to support his drug addictions. “I lived for the high!” Gabriel admits. It overwhelmed his very existence. What finally got to Gabriel was delivering drugs to homes where there were small children. “One time I even let a single mom handle her business while I watched her kids.” He realized, “I was robbing people of their souls!” Gabriel remembers being caught by police officers under the influence of a controlled substance and on several occasions spent time in jail. A DUI finally landed him in a drug rehabilitation program at age 24. Things were about to change for him.
A Spiritual Struggles Begins
His mother had struggled coming back into her family life. She got in trouble with the law, but finally Elizabeth was determined to get back into church. She now suspected her son had a serious drug problem and compelled him to go to church with her. This time Gabriel heard what the Pentecostal preacher said. He remembered going to the altar and the power of the Holy Ghost consumed him. He began to speak with other tongues, shaking him to his very core. The experience still left him hesitant to get baptized in Jesus’ name and commit his life to Jesus Christ. He returned to his drug use shortly thereafter, but a crisis rose in his very mind and soul. The drugs kept him high, but he returned several times to that Pentecostal altar to feel that powerful dosage of the Holy Ghost. Something was happening. He began to struggle spiritually serving his addictions, but at the same time feeling the pull of the Holy Spirit. One time, when he was incarcerated, he begged the guard for a Bible. He became concerned and conflicted when he read in Luke, chapter 11:24-26: “When the unclean spirit is gone out of the man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, ‘I will return onto my house whence I came out.’ And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worst than the first.” Gabriel reached an epiphany – “I realized in that moment this was my dilemma. I was loaded with countless dark spirits!” Shortly after this revelation, Gabriel reaped what was his conviction about himself. His brother had already been released from prison, and Gabriel was driving them during the high traffic commute. He knew they were up to no good, for Gabriel had a gun in his lap. An unmarked police car flashed his lights at them to stop, and Gabriel said, “I’m sorry, bro, I gotta do this! I gotta do this!” He floored the gas pedal and started a highspeed chase. He rammed several cars and unbelievably eluded the police. He threw the gun out the window, got off the freeway, and drove the vehicle to hide its whereabouts, knowing the cops had the plates. They would discover the vehicle was rented but never returned to the agency.
Rock Bottom
A week later, Gabriel returned to the hideout to take possession of the car. A mother of one his homies asked him a favor to drive her to a liquor store to cash some checks. What Gabriel didn’t know was there was a string of Subway Sandwich eateries being robbed. Gabriel had backed into the parking lot of the liquor store, keeping the car idling, and right next door was a Subway Sandwich eatery. The Merge Unit of the police department was monitoring the fast food restaurants trying to catch the “Subway Bandit”. Gabriel exclaims, “All at once I saw what appeared to be 40 agents surround my vehicle with guns drawn. ‘Put your hands up!’ they shouted. I immediately complied with the sudden realization that I had reached rock bottom. I frantically started calling out, ‘JESUS! JESUS! JESUS!”
