It took the bullet less than a second to fly half a mile toward the Denver Zoo. It took much longer before anyone realized what it meant.

The gunshot exploded from two rival groups of gang members gathered at East 20th Avenue and York Street near City Park. The bullet arced through the park, missing picnic grounds and hundred-year-old trees on its way over a wire fence, toward the polar bear exhibit.

Over the next few hours, the shooting would set off pagers, sirens and hospital machines, beginning what came to be known as Denver's "Summer of Violence."

That gunshot marked the opening volley of a long, exhausting and often frightening summer. It was a summer unlike any other Denver had experienced for sheer brazenness, random gunfire and the number of innocents cut down by bullets.

Laws were changed. Programs were born and, for a time, funds flowed freely.

Among the many people affected by the violence were a homicide sergeant, a mayoral aide, a hospital worker and a little boy. Their lives would change. So would the city.

They crossed paths 10 years ago today with the shooting in the zoo and again just weeks later when a 6-year-old was shot in front of his home.

It was violence with a cruel random streak. By the end of the year, it would claim a young schoolteacher on her way home, a man driving through Park Hill, a 62-year-old woman sitting in her house.

On that warm May day at the zoo, bystanders heard something go "twang" as the bullet ricocheted off a railing.

Outside the polar bear exhibit, 10-month-old Ignacio Fabian Pardo's head drooped. He started screaming. One of his aunts lifted his hat and saw blood.

As she picked up the baby, a mangled chunk of lead fell to the ground.

The first bullet had stopped.

'Sweetest sound'

Mayor Wellington Webb heard the shot. Webb was at his West City Park home a few blocks from the park. He was talking to an Adams County official about noise at Denver International Airport, when the sound came through the front door.

"That sounded like gunfire," Webb said.

Sgt. Armedia Gordon was driving home when she heard the call for a homicide detective on her police radio.

Then just as quickly, the call was canceled.

This is not possible, said Gordon, who had been a Denver Police homicide detective for two years. The early report was that a child had been shot in the head.

She turned around and headed for Denver General Hospital, now Denver Health Medical Center.

Within minutes of walking into the emergency, Gordon had her answer.

"I think the sweetest sound I ever heard was this angry, screaming, upset baby screaming at the top of his lungs."

Ignacio Pardo was going to live.

Within minutes of the shooting, Charlotte Stephens' phone began to ring.

"Girl, they done shot a kid in the park," one of her neighbors said. "Do you have any details?"

Stephens was a legislative aide to Webb in 1993. She lived near the park with her children.

"The park is like our country club," she said, recalling how much she used it for recreation with her kids and for her own exercise.

So when the shooting at the zoo happened, Stephens said she felt like a part of her life was under threat. Police never arrested a suspect in the shooting.

The gang problem in the park had been growing that spring. People felt intimidated by the gangsters who hung out in the park on weekends.

Now that intimidation turned to anger and cold stares. Eventually the city closed the road in the park to cars. That helped, Stephens recalled. The gang members still congregated, but only in the far southwest section of the park.

"It was like we sort of pushed them into a corner," she said.

Blood in the street

Any relief, however, was short-lived.

On June 9, 1993, Stephens was riding with Webb to a community meeting at a school when the driver's police radio went off. A 6-year-old boy named Broderick Bell had been shot in Park Hill. The house was a few doors down from the school. They pulled over.

"I remember seeing blood in the street," Stephens said. "I just kept thinking to myself, 'Oh my God, they've done killed a baby.' "

Webb tried to console the neighbors. Then they went into the school, which was instantly transformed into a meeting on the shooting.

The mayor told the crowd he was angry, and they should be, too. He asked people who had any information on gang members to turn it over to his office.

Within minutes, Stephens had hundreds of slips of paper reporting a crack house here, gang members there.

A few days later, residents in northeast Denver staged a parade through City Park and Park Hill, protesting the violence.

Broderick's mother, Ollie Phason, marched at the head of the parade.

Around St. Paul Street, a young gangster named Darryl Givens approached Phason and offered an apology for what had happened. Police suspected it was Givens' gang that had been involved in the shooting. Police think they know who did it but never had enough evidence to make an arrest. The statute of limitations on the crime expired seven years ago.

The night before the march, Givens told the Rev. Leon Kelly of Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives that he was thinking of approaching Phason.

Kelly told him it was a good idea and suggested Givens stand on a corner near where the parade would pass.

When the moment came, the crowd grew quiet.

"You could hear a pin drop," Stephens recalled.

It was an emotional moment she said. But anger quickly followed. People started to ask, "Why doesn't he tell the police what he knows?" she recalled.

Three years later, Givens did tell what he knew about another gang shooting - in court testimony. It cost him his life.

Givens testified against fellow gang member Orlando "Lil' O" Domena. Kelly said Givens thought at the time he had "a pass," an understanding with the gang that he had to do what he had to do.

The "pass" expired when Givens was found shot to death in a car in 1996.

Different with children

Inside the emergency department at Denver General, they got used to preparing for the shootings. That doesn't mean they got used to the shootings themselves.

"It is different when they bring in children. You see that child, and you know that pretty soon there's going to be a family in here. You know you're going to hear them in here grieving," said Jim Duran, one of the first from the medical team to see the streams of bleeding kids that summer. "You feel it. You feel it in the pit of your stomach."

In 1993, Duran had worked on the front lines in the emergency department for more than a decade, watching patients at the beginning and the end of treatment. As a health care technician, it is his job to help prepare the equipment, hook the patient to monitors in the trauma room. He wears scissors on his belt like a holster, ready to clip clothes to expose wounds. Once the patient is hooked up, Duran steps back, and waits.

That summer in the emergency department, people screamed. They weren't all in pain. They screamed at each other, from across the room, from separate beds. Rival gang members came in after a shooting and some staffers wondered if the gang members were there to try to finish the job.

After the summer of '93, the hospital installed metal detectors and beefed up security. At the end of the summer, some members of the hospital staff transferred to other facilities; some left medicine completely.

That summer, the hospital admitted 236 patients with gunshot wounds; the year before, there were 176.

In 1993, 53 of those patients were under 18.

Once those victims left the trauma rooms, Duran saw the summer's effects shaded by a different reality.

"After it's all over, I'm also the one who cleans up the mess," Duran said. "There can be a lot of blood, and somebody has to clean it up.

No one immune

By June, the city had created impact teams within each of the police districts. Selected officers were free to pursue criminals without having to answer routine calls from police dispatch.

Police stopped everyone they suspected of being a gang member. A lot of people got stopped.

Charlotte Stephens remembers her son - who was getting ready to go to college at the University of Northern Colorado - came home furious one night.

The police had stopped him while he was driving his mother's car.

"They're acting like I was a kid," she said he fumed.

"Baby, right now we've got some fools out there," she said, referring to the gang members. "And only the innocent people are getting shot.

"If the police have to stop you for you to be safe, then let them stop you. . . . All I want is for you to come home safely to me."

A papal visit to Denver for World Youth Day brought the city a breather.

There were just four reported aggravated assaults during that week, which brought thousands of teenagers from around the world to Denver.

Soon after the pope's trip, Mayor Webb and his wife Wilma were vacationing in Maine when they got a frantic call from his son Keith.

The son had been staying at his parents' home when someone drove by and pumped 14 shots into the residence.

Keith Webb described how he and his wife dove out of their bed and hit the floor.

No one was hit, but four shots pierced Wilma Webb's Jaguar.

"I was angry, mad, scared, frightened and pissed off," Webb said, recalling the incident. "All the natural things, because then, you forget that you're mayor."

Halloween homicide

The summer ended. The violence did not.

On Halloween night, Armedia Gordon was called out on another homicide.

It was a cold Sunday night. When she pulled up to the crime scene, Gordon remembers seeing bits of candy scattered in the snow. Eighteen-year-old Carl Banks Jr., an aspiring rap singer, was dead.

Police Chief Dave Michaud, who lived a few blocks from the shooting, had interviewed some kids who saw it happen. They gave him a name that led Michaud and Lt. Tom Haney to another home, where they sat up all night waiting for a teen to come home.

Finally, around 2:30 a.m., with still no sign of the teenager, Gordon went up to the door and spoke to a woman in a house dress who was sitting on a couch.

Gordon pointed to the chief and Haney sitting in the car.

"I said they're going to be here a real long time," Gordon said. "You're going to have to feed us breakfast."

Finally, she talked the woman into getting into a patrol car and leading police to where she thought her son might be.

Gordon said she knocked on the door and without prompting, the man who answered said, "Is this about the shooting?"

"It's not just a shooting, it's a homicide," Gordon answered.

Hearing that, a woman in the house shouted, "Get out here and tell the police whatever they want to know."

A short time later, police got the name of the suspect, Paul English III, 14, whom they arrested by daybreak.

Curfew credited

The Banks shooting led to a push for a citywide curfew, an idea Michaud had picked up from a police chief in Phoenix.

The curfew program - in which parents were forced to pick up their children from city recreation centers - led to a sharp drop in violent juvenile crime the following summer.

Kids who were picked up for curfew violations were funneled into youth programs run by the Safe City program, which Stephens was appointed to run.

The program began with $1 million in funds. Ten years later, Stephens is still in charge, but the program has no money to distribute.

Stephens, though, still has her park, which she uses most weeknights, when she and a group of friends take a walk around Ferril Lake.

She is glad to have her park back. It's where she brings her grandchildren and catches up on the news of the neighborhood.

"The park is an extension of my back yard. It's very important to me," she said. "For a $2.59 Happy Meal, I can spend three hours with my grandchildren and we have a great time."

Lasting connection

After five years in the homicide unit, Gordon continued up through the ranks to become a division chief.

That summer reaffirmed her faith in God, she said, and made her realize how fragile life can be.

It also taught her never to leave someone she loves an angry note. You never know if you'll see them again, she said.

She still keeps in touch with Broderick Bell and his family.

Recently, she got a birthday card from Broderick. On Sunday, she attended a ceremony at the Friendship Baptist Church as Broderick and his brother Devaun graduated from a Bible studies class.

"When I saw him walking up the aisle, I felt like I was going to cry because I'm so proud of him," Gordon said. "I feel connected to him."

Beating the odds

Ten years after the first shot was fired, the choir room of Barnum High School was filled with dozens of elementary school children, preparing for their big concert.

"Bringing us all together

Joining us all as one

Happiness has begun," they sang.

During a break, 10-year-old Ignacio Pardo put his hand to his forehead and moved his finger over a scar.

"Sometimes it feels like the bullet is still in there," he said.

Another scar rings the fifth-grader's scalp, where doctors had to open his head to fix his fractured skull. That was nearly 10 years ago, after he was shot while watching polar bears at the zoo.

"I don't know what happened to the bullet. I would kind of like to see it, but they didn't give it to me," he said.

"All I know is that the bullet is gone."

Earlier that day, the fifth-grader had spilled his backpack onto the floor of his home. Inside his pack, he found homework from two subjects he knows more about than most kids his age.

"In math we're studying probabilities," he said. "In science we're studying the human body."

Ignacio seems to have defied both, bouncing back with what appears to be a complete recovery. He excels in school and plays the piano and violin. In his spare time, he writes fantasy stories - dragon stuff, mostly. He once wrote a story about what happened with the shooting, but has since lost it.

As she sat next to her son on the couch, Rita Pardo smoothed his hair, just above the scar.

"I don't know if there will be any more long-term effects," she said. "His eyesight's a lot worse than an average 10-year-old."

"I'm also a lot smarter than an average 10-year-old," Ignacio chimed in, smirking.

The day before, he had taught a computer class at his school; he gave the class for his teachers. Afterward, he said, the adults told him "whatever I grew up to be, I'm going to be good at."

The first to bow

Later, inside the high school, Ignacio stood again, this time in the auditorium in front of more than a 1,000 parents.

"Rejoice," he sang, his face mirroring the words.

"Sing joy."

Somehow, he sang while smiling.

When the concert ended, Ignacio was the first to bow. When he raised back up with the honor choir, it was to a standing ovation.

A few minutes later, amid hugs and congratulations from the family, a woman recognized Ignacio and stopped him in the hallway.

"Excuse me," said the stranger. "I saw you in the back row. I just wanted to tell you that I was watching you and that I saw how you were singing."

She then looked at his parents.

"I could just see the joy coming out of this boy's face. Just the way he sang," the woman said, beaming.

"I just wanted to tell you. It was beautiful."

ensslinj@rockymountainnews.com or (303) 892-5291, sheelerj@rockymountainnews.com or (303) 892-2561 Listen to Ensslin and Sheeler today at 8 a.m. on the "State of Colorado," on KNRC AM (1510).

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