Lidia Ruiz had made a promise to her older son, Junior Villarreal, before he was killed last March. When he turned 18, she would throw him a big pizza party. Not the frozen pizzas she'd buy at the grocery store, but real pizza in a real pizza parlor.

Now it was early June, his birthday fast approaching, and she was determined to celebrate an 18th year he would never see.

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She invited family and his friends to the Mountain Mike's in Parlier. It was the town where Junior played Little League as a kid, the town where he was now buried at a cemetery surrounded by fruit orchards. They'd eat pizza, visit his grave and then pray for his soul at the little Catholic church in town.

Truth be known, Ruiz was afraid to hold the party anywhere near her home in southeast Fresno.

Just a few months earlier, in April, she had invited family and friends to a candlelight vigil at the Walmart on Kings Canyon Road where Junior had been killed. Nearly 100 people were gathered in the parking lot to remember her son, a struggling student who had been stabbed to death on March 25 while fighting with other troubled students from Sunnyside High School.

As the vigil ended, a car filled with young Bulldog gang members cruised by, and one of the occupants started barking, police said. Junior's friends took this as a show of disrespect and surrounded the car, striking it.

From the back seat, a gang member pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and began firing in the air, police said. As the crowd ran, the gang member took aim and fired again. This time, he grazed a few mourners.

"We could see the gun pointing out of the rear window," Maria Ruiz, Junior's aunt, recalled. "I had my daughters packed in the car. They were screaming and crying."

Many of the young Hispanics gathered that day to remember Junior had either dropped out of high school or were on the verge of dropping out, friends and family said. The young gang members in the car were almost certainly high school dropouts, as well, police said. This is, after all, a neighborhood where six out of 10 Hispanics never graduate from high school.

But among the mourners was a seventh-grader at Sequoia Middle School who was so lost and defiant that he, too, was on the brink of dropping out. The seventh- grader was Anthony, Junior's younger brother, a baby-faced 13-year-old caught in a child's husky body who was still struggling to absorb the death of his hero.

"I'm afraid for Anthony," Lidia Ruiz confided. "He's angry at the whole world, but he doesn't know how to react. Sometimes he acts like a little boy. Sometimes he talks about getting revenge."

She was hoping the birthday gathering, and the visit to Junior's grave, would finally allow Anthony a chance to grieve.

As family and friends gathered that Sunday at Mountain Mike's, it was good to be away from southeast Fresno, even for a day. Waiting for their pizzas, they swapped all kinds of stories about Junior.

There was the time he proudly pointed to his report card on the kitchen refrigerator. "Look, Tia, look," he shouted to his aunt. She got close enough to see that he had scratched out an "F" and turned it into a "B."

"I told him, 'Don't be like me, Junior,' " another aunt recalled. " 'I used to get stoned, but you don't want to end up like me. I dropped out. You can get high and still get your work done. Finish school, Mijo.' "

When he died at age 17, Junior had half the classroom credits he needed to graduate, and his cumulative GPA had fallen to 1.54.