“A ‘life after struggles’”

Posted: 16 Sep 2010 12:13 AM PDT

By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune, Sep 16, 2010

CHRISTOPHER ONSTOTT / TRIBUNE PHOTO

Monica Alexander visits the grave of her son, Anthony Branch Jr., and his father, Anthony Branch Sr. Her son's gravestone is missing, possibly vandalized by gang members in the spring. After a life of crime and drug addiction, Alexander is clean and sober and using her story to help break the cycle of gang violence.

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Monica Alexander always liked fancy things in life. She adored the fashionable leathers, handbags and sunglasses at stores such as Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue. But she could never afford them, so she shoplifted.

It's what everyone in her crowd at Cleveland High School was doing in the 1970s, she says. So she did too.

And so began her life of crime and addiction – a cycle she's desperately worked to end thirty years later.

Alexander dropped out of high school, got pregnant at 18, started using crack cocaine in her 20s and spent most of her adult life either high or in prison.

She's racked up 27 felony convictions for crimes such as theft, forgery and credit card fraud – fueled by her drug habit and desire to dress her five children in expensive name brands.

Because she was a single mother, it fell upon her oldest child, Anthony Branch Jr., to support his four younger sisters.

Anthony did, as best he could. When he was 12 – during the height of Portland's gang wars in the late 1980s – Anthony took up the gang lifestyle to make his own money selling crack cocaine.

It was also simply part of the culture. His friends and cousins were involved, his father sold drugs and his mother was fighting her own demons.

With his street name, "Lil' Smurf," his smaller stature and his trademark curly Afro he wore years after it went out of style, Anthony was soon known as one of Portland's most prolific gangsters.

At one point, police say, he was involved in just about half the shootings in the city – either as the shooter or the target.

Anthony often wore a bulletproof vest for protection, but left it in the trunk of the car the night he was killed. He was 20 years old.

Of all of the tragedies in her life, it's her son's death that haunts Alexander most.

"My neglect – I can admit that," says Alexander, now 50 years old and clean and sober for the past three and a half years. "Your life revolves around choices and consequences."

It was a Portland police sergeant who became her mentor and helped Alexander try to make up for lost time, doing good where she'd done wrong.

She has shared her story with children, college students, teachers, parents, gang members, law enforcement officials – anyone who'll listen – to inspire them to keep the cycle of violence and addiction from repeating.

"If I touch just one child, his murder will not go in vain," she says of Anthony's death. "As a parent, he didn't even have a chance, even to get halfway here."

COURTESY OF MONICA ALEXANDER • During the height of Portland's gang wars in the late 1980s, Anthony Branch Jr. took up the gang lifestyle to make money selling drugs in order to support his four younger sisters.

'Emptiness in my heart'

A petite woman with short cropped hair, Alexander's voice is gravelly from a lifetime of drug use. She walked out of prison for the last time in 2006 and had one drug relapse before getting clean again in April 2007.

She knew it was time to leave the life behind when she looked around one day in jail and noticed that all of her cellmates were as young as her daughters, and they were calling her "Mom." She was a grandmother pushing 50.

When her time was up, "I walked out of there; said 'I'm done,'" she says.

Nowadays, Alexander spends her days trying to heal others' wounds at a North Portland domestic violence program called Healing Roots.

She found the program as a domestic violence survivor herself – 15 years of abuse from a previous relationship. She also was sexually assaulted as a child, she says, and learned in group sessions how to reclaim her self esteem and deal with the trauma.

After completing the program, she volunteered at the center, then became a paid staff member, answering phones. Between work shifts, Alexander takes a full-time community college load and hopes to get a degree in social work so she can help others rebuild their lives, as she has.

Her four daughters and 13 grandchildren visit often, since most of them have moved from inner North and Northeast Portland too – both for cheaper housing and to escape the familiar racket of their past.

One day last week, Alexander stood at the Northeast Portland cemetery where both Anthony and his father, Anthony Branch Sr., lay side by side.

The elder Branch was murdered in his home by gangsters who were looking for Anthony Jr. that night, according to police.

"He walked up to me the night his father was killed and said, 'Mom, if anyone comes up to you and asks you, do you have a son, you don't have one,' " Alexander recalls vividly. "At that moment, I knew he was just trying to protect me."

Those who call him "notorious" didn't know Anthony's gentle side, she says.

Always a happy kid, she says, he loved eating Skittles, playing basketball and playfully wrestling with his younger sisters. "He was a beautiful kid, real big eyes, a knockout," she says.

His childhood didn't last long, though.

At age 10, Anthony's fifth-grade teacher at Laurelhurst Elementary saved an essay he wrote about drug dealing and how it made people lie and steal, even from their own family.

A year later, Portland saw its first drive-by shooting. Seven months after that, Anthony turned 12 and became a gangster, during the time Portland's gang wars began to boil over.

Adopting the name "Lil' Smurf" – inspired by his cousin and best friend, "Big Smurf" – Anthony soon amassed a host of friends and enemies as a gang leader.

He's said to have angered a violent group of gangsters on a visit to Richmond, Calif., who then came to Portland to spread their turf and drug trade. There are still fears in the community that the Richmonds, as they're called, are seeking retaliation for old beefs.

Anthony was seemingly invincible, police say. But he was finally gunned down one night in October 1997, in the parking lot of the Viewpoint Lounge on Northeast Killingsworth.

"This is final," Alexander said, holding back tears behind her sunglasses as she visited the cemetery last week. "The emptiness and pain in my heart – this part here is the hardest part for me."

TRIBUNE PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER ONSTOTT • Monica Alexander's son, Anthony Branch Jr., called himself Lil' Smurf and died in October 1997 as one of Portland's most well-known gangsters. He was 20.

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