Tall, stately Elonia Reynolds, who reveals her grief in her solemn gaze, had to brace herself to go back to Norland High, the school her murdered daughter LaToy loved dearly. But after another child was shot to death she decided to take a stand. So in January, the morning after the second shooting, Elonia, LaToy's two sisters and a small group of parents took up positions at the school's entrance, holding signs demanding an end to teenage violence.

But the Hondas and Chevys stopped just long enough to unload kids. Only hours after a boy was riddled with bullets on campus, no one stopped to talk, and no one came by to ask, "What can we do?"

So far, taking a stand in Norland is a lonely job.

The Norland neighborhood in North Dade, in the shadow of the aqua and orange Joe Robbie Stadium, is most of the time a sleepy collection of homes.

It is a neighborhood of bone-tiredness and grit, where parents make themselves upwardly mobile the hard way, by working two jobs, day shifts, night shifts -- the unvarnished side of the American Dream.
br> You could say the shootings of two teenagers had nothing to do with the school or the neighborhood that either could have happened anywhere.

Or you could say the shootings had everything to do with the school and the neighborhood, and whether they will endure or fail.

Another good neighborhood in the heart of Dade finds itself on the edge: facing surrender to decline, or a daunting long- term battle against it.

And you could say this is a test -- one that could happen, or is happening, in your own neighborhood -- of whether people today have the guts to fight for their children's futures and for their own safety.

That's what the parents and clergy who want the Norland neighborhood back say.

That's what Elonia Reynolds says. Elonia and her husband David, who themselves split day and night shifts as nurses, are selling and moving to Broward.

Memories of their 8-month-old tragedy are too painful. Each young kid marching by to class reminds them of LaToy.

But they don't blame the neighborhood or the school for the shooting. They blame the pathological few who would hold the community hostage.

They are the few who leave their shell casings in the church parking lots, who rip off purses from car seats when mothers drop their kids off for day care, who make it necessary to hire guards for children's Halloween parties.

They are the few who come armed when they crash neighborhood parties, who have made the practice of ending dances "with a bang" a custom, who have made students afraid to attend weekend events away from the protection of school.

LaToy, who would have graduated this spring from Norland, died last August on her 17th birthday, caught in the cross fire of a drug shootout at a neighborhood restaurant called Taste of the Islands. Three others died with her.

She didn't know her killers. She had led a sheltered life. The Reynolds children would be "hermits" if she had her way, Elonia says. LaToy had to beg for permission for a month to stay out late on her birthday. She was just in the wrong place.

In January, the nightmare happened again: Classmate Conroy Robinson, 17, died in a shootout with former friends behind the school gymnasium 45 minutes after the last bell.

Conroy's family, upset by media coverage of his death, declined to be interviewed for this story. But his death, on the heels of the Taste of the Islands massacre, shocked a number of people in the community into believing decisive change is needed now to save their school and neighborhood.

Norland High is a school of 2,500 mostly happy, motivated African American and Jamaican teens that has struggled with aging facilities and immigration pressures since white families abandoned it during 1970s desegregation. But now it is poised for a rebound.

An education magnet program begun this year has brought about 130 white families back to the school. Principal Fred Damianos has $3.5 million promised in the next few years for new classrooms, science labs and computers.

College Board test scores, though below national averages, are coming up slowly. Most students say they want to go to college. Damianos likes to point out several who are bound for the Ivy League next fall.

"The school is predominantly black, but not deprived," says Damianos.

School discipline problems are typical of the entire county. Between July '92 and last March, four gun and five knife incidents occurred at Norland -- but similar incidents occurred at 26 of Dade's 29 high schools.

The three high schools spared weapons incidents -- Hialeah, South Dade and South Miami -- might simply have lucked out. "Weapons are everywhere in South Florida," says Dade schools spokesman Henry Fraind.

Like the Norland School, the neighborhood has struggled since the '70s white exodus. The families that replaced them say the whites took political power with them. Street lights were repaired faster in the old days, they say. Mosquitoes were sprayed more often. Housing codes were enforced.

Tatleen Francis, a 13-year resident, lives along a main sewer line. When it rains, and a pumping station crashes, "do you know what happens to my bedroom?" she asks. "It's flooded with sewage."

In the '80s, against the wishes of Norland and nearby Carol City, Joe Robbie Stadium was built, and Ives Dairy Road, which runs through the neighborhood's heart, was extended to the Turnpike, bringing stadium traffic into Norland's midst. The coming of Marlins baseball has greatly multiplied the heavy- traffic days.

Residents, from young to old, say the stadium symbolizes their loss of power after white flight. Other neighborhoods get shopping malls, they say. Norland gets a stadium. They say they get only what no one else wants.

"We need to invest in our community," says Norland High senior Nischa Hitchman. "They tell us to pull ourselves up with our bootstraps, but they take them away. Give us our bootstraps."

In the late '80s, another wave of professional families moved out -- African American as well as white this time -- largely replaced by Caribbean immigrant families fleeing destitute homelands and seeking new starts. You can see the tremors rolling along this cultural and economic fault line in Census data. Between 1980 and 1990, in the Norland neighborhood:

* The percentage of adult residents with high school diplomas fell by 36 percent.

* The percentage of adult residents with college degrees dropped by 52 percent.

* The unemployment rate more than doubled -- to 11.2 percent.

* The median household income declined from $37,281 to $34,002.

* The percentage of residents below the poverty level rose from 6 percent to 10.9 percent.

Hopes rose when North Dade neighborhood activist Betty Ferguson, whose son is a Norland High ninth-grader, brought a lawsuit to achieve district representation on the Metro-Dade

Commission. She won a commission seat in spring elections. But that may not be enough to turn Norland around.

Since the deaths of LaToy and Conroy, Damianos is nervously waiting next fall to see whether families will run again, abandoning the magnet that has brought money and technology to Norland. Several magnet kids left immediately after the shootings, and he's had calls from frightened parents asking whether the school is safe.

Ferguson is fearful for her own son. "He may not be there much longer," she says. "He has some excellent teachers, but I can't separate him from the overall atmosphere. I have to put his safety first."

A reputation for danger can destroy a school, says Damianos, who was on the staff at Dade's American High when a student was slain at a nearby shopping center in 1980.

"The shooting about turned that place inside out," he says. "It left a perception of chaos, and it made American a symbol of everything in the schools that wasn't working. It took years to overcome."

He thinks Norland will need years to recover from its tragedies. Dade police say Norland-area crime runs the gamut from homicide to drugs to burglary, and in a patrol district that includes Highland Oaks, North Miami Beach and Aventura, Norland is the hottest. But gangs are not prevalent. Kids walk safely to school.

Families congregate for ice cream at the shopping center on Friday nights.

Fear, though, is a fact of life.

It is not the fear of an inner-city neighborhood, where the danger of crime is overt and constant. It is the fear of a usually peaceful suburb, where the violence is sporadic, random, and unpredictable.

Conrad Brown, a resident for 14 years, watched his wife drop her garden hose and dash for the house last month when a panel truck stopped in front of their home. The driver laughed and shouted, "I'm Federal Express! What are you running for?"

Norland is quiet most of the time, says Brown, but the shootings proved that violence can happen any time, any place, says Brown.

"The most dangerous element in this community is 15- to 18- year-olds," he says. "They will kill you like that. Your life, my life, has no value. And because of this the neighborhood breaks down. People live within their closed circle. It gets to be a way of life. You don't know who to trust."

The teenager the community fears most fits a distinct profile: He is male, he is black, he is poor, and he is being raised by a single parent who works long hours. The people who influence his life most are his friends, who form tight, closed groups.
br> Norland High junior Chris Leslie, 17, fits every aspect of the profile.

Except Chris has overcome his circumstances. He is making it. He renounces violence, he plans to graduate next year and go on to Florida State University. His girlfriend, Nischa Hitchman, is headed for Harvard.

Chris is indisputably the man of his family, forced to grow up fast at 12, when his dad died of cancer in Massachusetts and he and his mom, Millicent, had to move to Miami where an uncle could help them.

Since junior high, Chris has worked at Burger King, adding his check to the family income. He's now an assistant manager.

"I had a responsibility to my mom," he explains.

But despite his best efforts, Chris remains even more vulnerable to violence than the adults who fear him, because it is teenagers who live on the front lines of South Florida's pervasive gun culture.

Chris Leslie, like many students, does not go to house parties or community dances. He does not play in pickup basketball games at the neighborhood's Scott Park. He doesn't have much to do with anyone he doesn't know.

To survive, he hangs with a very tight group of teenagers who call themselves The Family. Its members call it a support group. Such groups are common among South Florida teens today.

The Family includes parents. If Chris' grades slip, there's hell to pay from Nischa's mom, Sonia.

Explains Family member Niaya Patterson, 16: "We think the same. We all have goals."

Dances and parties are out -- they too often become "tests of manhood," Chris says.

"You go to a club or a party, and no one wants to leave home without a gun. Then you bump into somebody and you're looking to get jumped afterward." He tried the dances at the John F. Walsh Center on 199th Street last fall, which were organized by Sherria Campbell, a Norland mother of two. Campbell spent $1,000 per dance to hire deejays and guards with metal detectors, nearly going broke doing it, she says, because she hoped to save teens from the potential tragedies of unsupervised house parties.

But she only exposed herself to the same dangers. A teenager came to a dance last winter with a weapon. He never got inside, but he fired shots in the parking lot.

"I was petrified," says Campbell.

"Somebody always turns a good thing into something bad," says Chris.

Campbell canceled the dances for two weeks. Then, a few weeks later, Conroy Robinson was killed at Norland High, and she stopped the dances permanently.

"There's just a real risk dealing with teenagers," says Campbell.

She still wants to help them, but not at such close range. She's now organizing a phone counseling hotline through her church. At Norland High, security asserts itself in obvious and sometimes oppressive ways.

The grounds are surrounded by a six-foot chain-link fence. A school police car stays parked at the front gate. Twelve adult monitors cruise the halls and perimeter with three golf carts. Forty-six faculty members carry walkie-talkies. The Dade school district now has mandated metal detectors, which Damianos thinks will be superfluous.

Behind the gates, the kids are inundated with anti-violence messages.

Chris and Nischa were recruited into a Varsity Patrol, a group of 50 students that helps monitor the hallways.

The kids are preached to by the county's Youth Crime Watch on how their generation has become inured to weapons and violence. "When someone died 10 years ago, it really affected you," Crime Watch coordinator Ricky Wiggins tells them. "Today, so what? Someone got smoked. How do we deal with this?"

Violent confrontations are a trap, says senior Cawachi Clemons, 18. You don't want to run from a threat, you don't want to be "dissed" -- or disrespected -- but you don't want to lose your life over a trivial dispute.

"I've got to defend myself, but how?" Clemons says. "Sometimes it's either kill or be killed."

Complains Arnetra Robinson, 16: "You can't even argue with somebody anymore."

Students are forming a group called SAVE, Students Against a Violent Environment. Others are being signed up as volunteer counselors and trained in "conflict resolution."

Students in the magnet education program have been drafted by the magnet coordinator B.J. Orfely into teams of Enviro-Cops to take the message of nonviolence to the Norland elementary and middle schools.

And everyone was asked this spring to compete in a school essay contest. The subject: How to Prevent Violence in the Schools and Communities.

Among the winning essays, senior Monisha Jenkins, who hopes to study law at Harvard, wrote: "The responsibility begins in the home . . . A positive environment filled with love will develop individuals with confidence and high self-esteem. . . . The school, church and community should be an extension. . . . "

Over at District 6 Metro-Dade police station, responsible for protecting Norland, Maj. Gary Minion praises Monisha's essay.

"All we read are the confessions," he says. "It's sad. It's sad. When the juveniles write out their confessions. And they tell us how old they are. And they tell us what they've done. It's sad, I'm telling you."

Like many officers at the District 6 station, including several who grew up in Norland, Minion questions whether the neighborhood has what it takes to save itself.

Minion says he has attended Norland meetings on crime. Officers outnumbered residents.

"It's basically an apathetic neighborhood," Minion says. "It is working people who are coming home at 7 at night and going to work at 6:30 in the morning. They just don't have time to become involved."

And they shouldn't count on the police to do it for them, he says.

"I'm not a crusader," Minion says. "I'm here to support the communities, but I'm not running the show. It's their community. They have to take the lead in what they want. We cannot do it. Too many people think we should do it. Too many people rely on us to do it. But police alone cannot maintain or keep any given area safe, keep all the abandoned cars off, all the trash out of the front yards, all the little students at home, safe in bed, and stop all the graffiti, make sure there's not domestic murders, stop all the people from drinking outside the 7-Elevens. We can't do that. Period. The people who live in that neighborhood can do it. They've got to police themselves."

LaToy's father, David Reynolds, also has his doubts about neighborhood resolve.

When teens beat a Vietnamese boy to death last year in Coral Springs, Reynolds says, the culprits were rounded up immediately. There have been no arrests in the murder of LaToy or Conroy. People don't help the police, the Reynolds family complains.

"There's a lackadaisical attitude in Norland," David Reynolds says.

An inexplicable complacence, sometimes outright complicity, of Norland's law-abiding majority with its violent few is what frustrates and infuriates the Rev. Dennis Lueke, pastor of Bethany Lutheran Church. "People know who have the guns," he says. "But the community will not speak up. Dumping it on the police is ludicrous. We're going to end up where we'll have to have a policeman for every person."

The same psychology operates at the school, says Dirk Thurston, 17. "The majority sits back. They feed off it. They say, 'Oh, yeah, he's got a gun! A fight!' They want to see it. They want to see violence."

The Rev. Marta J. Burke, pastor of Norland United Methodist Church, believes Norland's problems are deeply sociological and far more complex than mere law enforcement.

Burke, a white, Tennessee missionary who has worked in Africa, traces Norland's "spiral of decline" to the white flight, to "institutional ghetto-ization" of black parts of northwest Dade, to self-fulfilling expectations of failure of black children.

Burke seeks a plan of attack for helping Norland that includes not only the police, but Dade's housing-code enforcers, the North Dade Chamber of Commerce, the county's Youth and Family Development Agency, the principals of Norland's feeder elementary and middle schools, Health Department psychologists and nurses -- everyone who can help.

Her goal is to raise neighborhood expectations and standards through tough enforcement of laws and through family and business counseling.

"We do have options," says Burke.

"We're not backed into a corner. It's time for us to be empowered."

The start will be a convening of Dade's myriad agencies at her church May 22. She's invited nearly every service provider in the county.

The effort is similar to a campaign conducted in West Perrine after an anti-drug crusader was gunned down by cocaine dealers two years ago. In that neighborhood, people responded, rallying around the campaign, marching on crack houses. Burke isn't sure how many people will answer her wake-up call.

But Elonia Reynolds hopes many do. Her own wake-up call was the kind she wouldn't want anyone else to go through.

It happened in August, when she found her 19-year-old daughter Natalie waiting for her in the living room at 8:30 a.m. on a Sunday. Natalie, who had been out with her sister, looked as though "she'd been through war."

LaToy had died in Natalie's arms on the floor of the restaurant. The sister had to go home and tell her mom and dad. Elonia couldn't listen. She ran from the room. "I heard someone say the word 'shooting,' " she says.”I thought, 'My God! Not my daughter!' "

So much grief.

So much more than people should have to bear.

A few months after the killing, Elonia opened her door to find a 5-year-old child on the porch, staring up at her. The child was the son of a gunman who had died in the massacre. He was taken to her home by friends who hoped Elonia might see that loved ones on all sides had suffered. But Elonia could only see another generation at risk, another to fear.

She closed the door.

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