CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Eleazar glanced up from the toy cars he pushed across a threadbare carpet, flashing back to the moment when the men gunned down and killed his father.

"They were in a black pickup," the 10-year-old whispered as a younger brother and sister listened with averted eyes. "The windows were dark. I couldn't see them."

Eleazar's father had brought him and a brother along to an appointment. Their father parked, told his sons to stay put and walked across the street for the meeting. Loud bangs jolted the boys seconds later. Eleazar watched the killers drive away, then ran to his dad's side as he lay facedown in the street, dead.

"He was involved in bad things," Eleazar's grandmother, Beatriz Ramirez, 47, said of her 30-year-old son-in-law. "He died three days after his sister also was killed."

Legions of children like Eleazar - some say as many as 15,000 - have lost one parent or both to the drug-fed malevolence devouring Ciudad Juarez.

Fragile seedlings, these children have lives sullied by blood, blackened with loss, gnarled in rage.

"Violent death is doubly bad," said Silvia Aguirre, director of a volunteer group that offers grief counseling and support to victims' families. "In addition to the hurt of losing someone, the survivors are left with the shame and embarrassment of how and why they died.

"If you tend to them, you break the cycle of violence," Aguirre said of the children. "If you don't, they can grow up to be their father's avengers."

Some say perhaps 60,000 Mexican children have been orphaned by the criminal violence since late 2006, basing that guess on the more than 40,000 people murdered.

There might be far fewer narco-orphans than that, or many more. No one really knows.

9,700 dead in 4 years

But no corner of the country has suffered the bloodshed worse than Juarez, a city of some 1.2 million sprawling along the Rio Grande and deep into the Chihuahuan desert. Gang warfare has culled some 9,700 lives in four years, according to a local newspaper's count.

Nearly all of Juarez's dead have been younger men, but more than 700 women and dozens of children are included. Assassins have shot fathers with young children riding beside them in the family car. Couples and entire families have been murdered together.

Children losing both parents usually find refuge with grandparents, older siblings, aunts or uncles. In any case, their lives change forever, often for the worse.

"Families are mutilated, children lose structure," said psychologist Carmen Serna, who estimates 40 percent of the patients she counsels at a public clinic are survivors of violent death. "Emotionally, the children are very depressed, suffer post-traumatic stress.

"They have a lot of aggression. They become violent with their families and their schoolmates."

Eleazar and his three siblings moved into their grandmother's cramped house when their mother disappeared, supposedly seeking addiction treatment a few months after their father was killed.

Ramirez, who says her alcoholic husband returns home only occasionally, feeds eight mouths on a few dollars a month.

The killing of Eleazar's father was one of 28 in Juarez in one Sunday 18 months ago. News reports begrudged just a few sentences to his death. He had been shot in the chest, side and arm. Investigators recovered 14 spent assault rifle shells from the scene. The psychological shrapnel remains with Eleazar and his siblings still.

Some efforts at healing

The sister, 7, gets good grades, studies hard, but is quiet and withdrawn, Ramirez said. A brother, 9, disappears frequently, while another, at 6, is behind in school and has developed a vicious punch. Eleazar is suspended frequently for fighting, acting out, arguing with teachers.

"He's very rebellious, very rude," his grandmother said of Eleazar.

Aguirre's Family Center for Integration and Growth focuses on healing the stress. Workshops run by trained volunteers aim to help adults overcome their grief and young children to shake off anger and hurt.

"I think I am happy sometimes," America, 8, said at a recent session when asked by a counselor to finish a sentence starting with "I think."

Gunmen killed America's 35-year-old father, a systems engineer at a Juarez factory, on Father's Day last year, apparently by mistake, said his wife Graciela Guzman. The killers were attacking a house across the street, and her husband, sitting outside, was sprayed with bullets.

Guzman did not tell America or her 6-year-old sister how he died.

"When they grow up they can know the truth. Not now. I can't. It would be very cruel," Guzman. "The worse thing is that people think he was killed because he was involved in something."

Only a few hundred people in Juarez receive the counseling offered by such groups. Little more than 1,000 registered for a government program providing violence survivors scholarships, food and other aid. Many of the rest, like Eleazar, have been absorbed fitfully into Juarez's teeming, poor and violent neighborhoods.

'Imagine the mentality'

"Before, if you asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up, the boys would say 'policeman' or 'fireman,' " said Maria Juarez, a counselor at the Juan Alanis school, where she estimates 90 percent of the students come from broken homes.

"Now many will say they want to be assassins," Juarez said. "Just imagine the mentality of the young people now."

Young or old, many survivors become consumed by things they imagine they could have done to protect their loved ones.

"If I had been with him it wouldn't have happened," said Manuel, 13, a sad-eyed seventh-grader whose father was kidnapped and murdered in February. "I could have saved him."

For months after the killing, Manuel carried a newspaper photograph of his father's brutalized body in his wallet. He took to wearing his father's favorite winter coat, even in Juarez's scorching heat. His grades plummeted and he became withdrawn.

"He loved me a lot. It affects me every day," Manuel said, tears surging in hooded eyes. "I feel so alone."

dudley.althaus@chron.com

'VIOLENT DEATH IS DOUBLY BAD'