South L.A. taco stand shooting that injured 3 children stuns residents
Murel Polee walks past a store at 94th and Figueroa streets in South Los Angeles where three children were caught in the crossfire of a shooting in front of a taco stand Wednesday night.
It was an ordinary evening scene in South Los Angeles: a group of adults and children gathered in front of a taco stand, grabbing a bite to eat.
From around a nearby corner came a black car with tinted windows. The vehicle stopped in the middle of the street. Suddenly, someone inside the car opened fire, sending people running for cover.
As screams filled the air, an 11-year-old boy threw himself on the ground and crawled toward a nearby cellphone store for safety. He said he felt a burning in his right hand and looked down. He had been struck by shrapnel.
The boy heard the car’s tires screech as the vehicle sped off. He looked up and saw one of his friends, a 13-year-old girl, screaming and crying. She had been shot in her side.
The boy’s father, who had been inside the cellphone shop when the shooting occurred, ran outside and tried to comfort the girl.
“Stay awake, stay alive,” he told her. “You’re going to be OK.”
The shooting at 94th and Figueroa streets about 8:40 p.m. Wednesday left three children wounded, including a 13-year-old boy who was struck by gunfire, police said. The children weren’t the gunman’s target, police said; they were just standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In a year when homicides, shootings and other crimes have risen across the city, officials said the taco-stand shooting was a sobering reminder of the violence that continues to hit South L.A. particularly hard.
“Any time an innocent child is a victim of a crime of this magnitude it resonates,” said LAPD Deputy Chief Bill Scott, who oversees the department’s South Bureau. “You don’t want anybody to be a victim of a crime like this, but particularly innocent children who were just minding their own business.”
The 11-year-old boy said the gunman appeared to be aiming for a man standing not far from the taco stand. Cmdr. Andrew Smith, a police spokesman, said investigators are looking at gang activity as a possible motivator, but would not know for sure unless they could catch the suspect or interview the intended victim.
City Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents the area, said the shooting highlighted the need to find long-term solutions to South L.A.’s violence.
“It is absolutely alarming,” he said.
As of Saturday, Los Angeles Police Department figures show, almost 475 people had been shot in the South Bureau district this year — a nearly 35% increase from 2014.
People who live in South L.A. have long been affected by shootings and killings, Harris-Dawson said. But the recent rise in crime, along with shootings like the one on Wednesday, has prompted people elsewhere in the city to pay attention, he said.
Residents described a neighborhood marred by gang activity, prostitution and a fatal drive-by shooting a month ago, just down the street from where the taco stand was set up Wednesday. The area is made up of single-story stucco homes, apartment buildings and small businesses, a five-minute walk from the 110 Freeway.
On Thursday, blood stains could still be seen on the floor of the cellphone store where the 11-year-old crawled for cover. Bullet holes pocked the outside wall.
The boy’s father said he felt guilty that the neighborhood wasn’t safer for his children. He said he already tried to keep his son off the streets as much as possible, putting him in an after-school program that lasted until the evening.
Now, the man said, his son is worried about going outside.
“They’re just children,” he said. “They just want to ride bikes, hang out and play soccer.”
Scott said his investigators have prioritized the case, hoping a quicker analysis of evidence will help them find the gunman faster.
“Some cases garner more attention than others just because of the nature of what happened. This is one. These are kids,” he said. “We definitely don’t want that person roaming the streets.”
Police described the shooter as a black man between the ages of 20 and 25, with a short Afro, a black shirt and a piercing — some type of stud or diamond — near his left eye. The vehicle was described as a black, four-door Honda Civic.
Many witnesses, including the boy and his father, declined to give their names out of concerns for their safety. One man — who gave only his first name, Michael — said he was in a nearby apartment building Wednesday evening when he heard about 15 gunshots.
As he ran outside to see what happened, he said, some boys were already running toward his apartment building. One ran inside, he said, but the others raced to the back of the building.
Michael found one of the boys sitting on a stair outside the building, with a dime-size bullet hole in the back of his shirt. Another hole about as big as a quarter had torn through the shirt’s front. The boy was bleeding.
Michael ran inside to get a towel and called 911, following the dispatcher’s instructions on how to apply pressure to the boy’s wounds. The boy was dazed and didn’t say anything, Michael said.
“I feel really bad for these kids,” he said.
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