Holiday Slayings Rock Hardened Rampart Residents : Violence: Seven were killed in city’s busiest police division. But neighbors vow to fight crime and gangs.

Apartment manager Dan Woodard, a 50-year-old former military man, marches through his 81-unit complex near MacArthur Park with his chin jutting out, harboring no illusions about his neighborhood.

There is a .38-caliber revolver hidden under his right pants leg, a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in a shoulder holster and a foot-long, police-issue flashlight in his hands. He has been stabbed four times, he said, and has had three ribs broken during scuffles. He said he has learned what it takes to live in the Rampart district, one of the toughest sections of Los Angeles. But even he was dismayed by the seven homicides that rocked the nine-square-mile area over the holiday weekend.

“Yesterday was Memorial Day,” said Woodard, a veteran of the Navy and Merchant Marine. “We were supposed to be honoring people who made us free. Are we free here?”

Violence over the long weekend is an example of what has made the Police Department’s Rampart Division west of downtown the busiest in the city--Los Angeles’ version of “Ft. Apache,” the outgunned police station in New York’s South Bronx. Its officers learn the streets fast and its veterans thrive on the action--Rampart took 77,000 calls last year, more than any other division.

“If you’re lazy, don’t come here,” said Sgt. Paul Von Lutzow, a 22-year veteran who requested his Rampart assignment. “If you want to work eight hours and then go home, forget this place. I like it. Time goes by real fast.”

But Von Lutzow, 44, said the weekend violence was extraordinary, even for Rampart.

On Sunday, the action kept him five hours past his usual dismissal time at the station on West Temple Street. He said he was so tired after the shift that he skipped dinner and went straight to bed.

Von Lutzow attributes the area’s problems--including 39 homicides this year, the second highest in the city after the 77th Division in South-Central--to violent street gangs, a thriving drug trade and a shortage of officers.

Officially, 250,000 people live in Rampart, bordered by Santa Monica Boulevard and the Santa Monica Freeway on the north and south and the Harbor Freeway and Normandie Avenue on the east and west. But police say that there are at least that many undocumented immigrants packed into the area.

The weekend shootings even dampened the spirits of those on an anti-gang march sponsored Sunday by the Immaculate Conception Church.

Gloria Farias, a mother of three who joined 400 others in the march around MacArthur Park on Sunday night, is angry that more residents are not actively fighting crime.

“We’re tired of this violence,” said the longtime resident of Rampart’s Pico-Union district. “We’re tired of these drugs. We’re burying our children. It makes me really frustrated and angry.”

Officer Webster Wong, who organizes neighborhood watch groups in Rampart, agrees that more people need to get involved. He said one grim positive result from all the shootings is that it often takes large doses of crime to wake up a community.

“It’s sad to say, but people have to wait until they are victims before they are motivated,” he said. “There’s a lot more work to be done. You can go from one block that’s very nice to the next block, where crime is everywhere.”

Working with the division’s 363 officers is Rosario Rodriguez, a 35-year resident of Lakeshore Terrace who was once robbed at gunpoint. Now she fights crime her own way.

While she was waiting at the bus stop on Beverly Boulevard one morning seven years ago, a gang member grabbed her white hospital uniform, put a knife to her chest and demanded her purse.

“He said he was going to kill me and then he took my purse,” she said. “Later the gang broke into my house and took my jewelry and followed me wherever I went.”

Now Rodriguez spends her spare time at the Rampart Division, answering phones, working as a translator, organizing her neighbors and even emptying office trash cans, as she was doing Tuesday morning. “If I had a knife on my chest now, I’m not afraid,” she said. “If they follow me now I tell them, ‘I’ll meet you at the Police Department.’ ”

Despite the tough weekend, optimism persists.

“Like any neighborhood, it has its ups and downs,” said Maurice Hernandez, who runs the busy Botica del Pueblo Pharmacy at the crime-plagued corner of Alvarado and 7th streets. “. . . This area is going to go one way and that’s up.”

Woodard is not giving up either.

“These people are not going to intimidate me,” he said, referring to the gang members and drug dealers hanging around his building. “They aren’t going to take over. Surrender is not in my vocabulary. It’s like when I went to sea. You get on some ships and they’re rough. You complete the job.”