Date: Monday, December 2, 1985 Source: By Ann Marie Lipinski. 
Section: NEWS   Copyright CHICAGO TRIBUNE 
PREP STAR`S `TICKET OUT` IS TORN UP IN STREETS

    No one who knew Mario Flores believed it was true. Not Arthur Hill, his
best friend and idol. Not Randy Wortman, who had coached Flores to national
recognition as a diver. Not even Daniel Penasantana, one of the leaders of a
street gang in Flores` North Austin neighborhood.

    If Flores was capable of murder, Penasantana reasoned, he was too smart
to have killed so stupidly.

    The victim was Gilbert Perez, whose body was found in a West Side alley
after a chance encounter with Flores and two companions. Perez`s head and
chest had been ripped open by five bullets.

    The death of Perez might have gone unnoted, a murder seemingly
distinguished only by its position as the first gang killing of 1984, one of
73 that year.

    It might have gone unnoted had it not been for the arrest of Flores, 19,
an athlete who stood as a symbol of hope in North Austin, a Mexican immigrant
courted by Ivy League colleges, a kid no one doubted when he said he would be
diving in the 1988 Olympics.

    In August, Flores was convicted of Perez`s murder and sentenced to death.
He also has been charged with the attempted murder of a man paralyzed in a
shower of bullets.

    ``Mario was as good a diver as any of us had ever seen and knew it was
his ticket out,`` said Louis Torres, one of his coaches. ``But he got caught
somewhere in the middle. He missed his bus.``

    Some of the people who know Mario Flores say his is a story of warring
worlds, of talent caught up in the tension between glorious dreams and the
reality of life on a city`s mean streets. Among the tales of those who climb
from meager urban beginnings to middle-class success, there are some dramatic
examples of how perilous that climb can be.

    In 1983, Vincent McCall, a black from New York`s Harlem neighborhood,
worked his way up to an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy and an
academy boxing title, only to have his life shattered in a soured drug deal
and the death of a California surfer. Charges against McCall were dropped in
exchange for his testimony against two neighborhood friends.

    And this summer, Edmund Perry, 17, who made his way from Harlem to
prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy, was shot to death by a plainclothes
detective who said Perry had tried to rob him. A grand jury cleared the
officer of any wrongdoing.

    And in Chicago it was Mario Flores.

    Experts in the psychology of minority adolescents say it is so difficult
for a talented child from lower or lower-middle class environs who tries to
straddle two different worlds that the one who succeeds is more the exception
than the rule.
    ``Many view themselves as turncoats,` said Dr. James Comer, professor of
child psychiatry at the Yale University Child Studies Center. ``What happens
with many of these young people is they start doing self-destructive things,
things that will prevent them from succeeding.``

    Comer, who grew up in a low-income black family in East Chicago, Ind.,
recalls his own attempts to sabotage success, once by intentionally failing
an exam in a class that was necessary for entrance to medical school. Others,
he  said, are less subtle in their rebellion, resorting to criminal activity
to prove their allegiance to the streets.

    Gifted adolescents in urban environments, unlike their suburban
counterparts, ``tend to find themselves in this struggle a lot,`` said
psychologist Reed Larson, director of the Laboratory for the Study of
Adolescents at Michael Reese Hospital.

    ``In better neighborhoods . . . parents interact more with the teachers
and the parents of their children`s friends, making it difficult for a kid to
maintain different personalities,`` Larson said. ``In a city, especially in
poor areas, there is less of that bridging of worlds and many more forces
pulling kids apart.``

    Psychologist Sheila Ribordy, who as director of De Paul University`s
Community Mental Health Center treats many adolescents from the Cabrini-Green
public housing complex, said that when faced with a conflict between rising
to the middle class or maintaining their roots, most minority adolescents
will choose the latter.

    ``When it comes down to taking what is natural--their environment--or
something that is better but different, they opt for the environment, what
they grew up with,`` Ribordy said. ``That`s why a kid with so much talent
will chuck it all. If we take someone like the diver and offer him a new
world yet  fail to teach him to integrate it with life in his neighborhood,
I`m not sure  we`ve done him a favor.
    ``I`m sounding pretty pessimistic, but I`ve been working at this problem
for 11 years, and while we`ve had our few successes, most of the kids can`t
make it,`` she said.

    ``Mario had a desire to achieve in a big way, but he also had a
neighborhood to go home to every day,`` said Benjamin Finley, a social worker
at the Cook County Jail school who befriended Flores. ``I got to know Mario,
and I`ll tell you this: People may have been kindly to him, people may have
had high expectations for him, but nobody knew him.

    ``I don`t mean to be critical of those who worked with him in diving, but
I think they only saw what they wanted to see. Nobody ever sat down with him
and got close enough to hear him say, `Look, I really love this diving, but
when I leave this pool I have some other things to deal with on the streets.`

    ``I`m just scared of society,`` Flores told his jurors in a quiet moment
of insight at his sentencing hearing in August. ``You know, I came up to a
point where I don`t really want to go back out on the street because they
don`t let me finish my goals.``

    When Flores was 7, he moved to Chicago from Mexico City with his father,
Romero; mother, Ana; and three siblings. The family rented an apartment near
Cermak Road and Paulina Street and, according to his family, Flores was quick
to adjust. He won a prize in a science fair and began showing promise on the
soccer field.

    By the time Flores was ready for high school, his family had moved to
North Austin, a working-class patch on the West Side.

    His sisters, Lina, 25, and Graciela, 22, had graduated from Whitney
Young, an ambitious high school with a reputation for high academic standards
and low tolerance for troublemaking. They wanted their brother to go there as
well. But neither Flores` grades nor his position in a citywide lottery
earned him a place at Young. Lina said she and Graciela went to see Randy
Wortman, a  Young vice principal, and beseeched him to find a place for
Flores.

    ``They made a good case,`` Wortman said. ``We decided to take a chance.``
The gamble was rewarded when Flores asked to try out for the swim team in
his freshman year. Though Flores had had no prior training, Wortman, who also
coached, took one look at him coming off a diving board and thought, ``The
kid has it.``

    If diving gave Flores a certain cachet among the students at Young, it
also gave him the burden of proving himself as one of the few Hispanics in a
sport that was dominated by white suburban athletes. Romero Flores remembers
surveying the bleachers at his son`s swimming meets and frequently finding
that he and his family members were the only minorities there. There was none
of the community support they had seen at Flores` soccer games.

    ``In the Spanish community people would look and say, `What the hell is
he trying to do? Be like the white guys? Aren`t we good enough?` `` Lina
said. ``Then we would go to see him dive, and people there would laugh at
him. `That kid will never make it against the whites,` they`d say.``

    That Flores would seek friendship with Arthur Hill, then, was no
surprise. Hill, a Chicago Vocational High School diver, was the first black
athlete to win a state diving championship.
    ``I knew what he was going through,`` said Hill, now a senior on a diving
scholarship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ``We were two
minorities trying to be somebody in a sport that says you`re not supposed to
make it here. Every day we had to push that aside and find the courage to
keep at it.``

    By his junior year, word of Flores` talent began circulating among
collegiate diving coaches.

    Louis Torres, a diving coach who had grown up in a Hispanic neighborhood
heavy with gang activity, was concerned that Flores might have trouble
bridging life in his neighborhood with the elite, mostly white world of
diving. He was pleased that Flores seemed to have found a role model in Hill.
Like Flores, Hill came from a tough neighborhood, Englewood, but had found a
way out.

    ``Through diving, Arthur was able to get out, and Mario could see that,``
Torres said.

    ``If Mario was in trouble with gangs or anything else, he would have
confided in me,`` Hill said. ``If he thought he had reached a point where he
had nowhere to turn, I would like to believe I would have gotten a call.
Because I didn`t get that call, I can`t believe he was in that situation. No.
The dude was not capable of having a split personality.``

    But far from the swimming pool, in police files around Chicago and
several suburbs, signs of trouble had begun to appear. Starting in 1978, when
he was arrested on charges of criminal damage to property, Flores began
accumulating a record of juvenile infractions, including four arrests on
charges of auto theft.

    According to William Mills, Flores` school counselor, his attendance at
swimming practice often would be the last teachers would see of him.

    He also was failing to live up to the academic promise of his sisters.
Mills said Flores` grades were falling so precipitously that it became
apparent during his junior year that he would probably not have the 2.0
average required by most of the colleges interested in him as a diver.

    ``Having this area where he excelled greatly had the sad effect of
overemphasizing his areas of weakness,`` Mills said. ``There were pressures
he couldn`t reconcile. I know as a staff we pressured him to achieve and said
we  believed in him. But Mario did not really think he would make it. He was
never convinced he was destined for success. Everyone else thought he was,
and we all painted that picture of him. But secretly, I don`t think Mario
ever believed it would happen.``

    Gang leaders in Flores` neighborhood acknowledge his friendship with many
gang members and say it was not uncommon to find him in their hangouts.
Penasantana, a friend of Flores` and leader of one of the North Austin gangs,
insists Flores` involvement was strictly social.

    But Reynaldo Guevara, a Gang Crimes North detective who would eventually
arrest Flores on charges of murder, tells a different story.

    ``He was a hard-core gang member,`` he said. ``He could put a bullet
through someone`s brain without a thought. He was that cold. People who talk
about this other side of Mario--I never saw it. They say he was a great
diver. What I want to know is, Why in the hell did he choose the gangs over
that?``

    On Aug. 5, 1984, Louis Rosero, 25, ran into Flores. Flores owed him
money, Rosero said, and offered to give him some tires in lieu of payment.
Rosero said he got in Flores` car and drove to an alley near Flores` home.

    When they arrived, Rosero said, Flores took out a .38 automatic and shot
him five times in the chest. Flores was charged with attempted murder.

    Then, in November, 1984, Guevara persuaded a reluctant witness to the New
Year`s Day slaying of Perez to come forward. Her statement linked Flores to
that murder.

    According to police reports and court testimony, Flores was with two
friends and reputed gang members when they saw an accident near North and
Western Avenues in the early hours of Jan. 1. Perez, who was drunk, got out
of his car and began shouting his gang affiliation.

    The three indicated to Perez that they would hide him from police, but
instead they drove him to a nearby alley, police say.

    There, police say, Flores and one of his friends shot Perez in the head,
chest and abdomen.

    ``Beyond murder, Mario Flores was guilty of wasting his life,`` said John
Brady, an assistant state`s attorney who prosecuted him.

    Flores` parents say their son had asked them to move to the suburbs. He
said the pools were better and diving more highly regarded. This fall,
shortly after Flores` trial, the family moved to a small, quiet suburb.

    In Champaign, Arthur Hill is trying to decide whether he should undertake
the grueling campaign for a spot on the 1988 Olympic team. He thinks his
chances are good.

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