Bullets Rain, Mobile Home Dwellers Say : Residents Dread Fallout From 4th

Laurette Bineau fears that a breath of fresh air outside her Pacoima mobile home this Saturday night could be her last.

She and her husband will stay inside, as will other residents of the Shelter Isle Mobile Home Park who are showered every July 4 and every New Year’s Eve by bullets nearby celebrants fire into the air.

Bineau, 65, demonstrated the scope of the problem Thursday by handing a dish containing 87 bullets to a Los Angeles city councilman and two police captains Thursday at a press conference outside the mobile home park on Glenoaks Boulevard.

Residents found the bullets on their streets, lawns and patios the morning after last July 4, Bineau said.

Los Angeles City Councilman Ernani Bernardi and police captains Arthur W. Sjoquist and William Pruitt warned of the dangers of what seems a time-honored holiday custom for some: shooting guns at the sky.

“It’s just sheer luck that we don’t have somebody dead,” Sjoquist said. Police believe many revelers don’t realize that bullets eventually must come down from as high as 10,000 feet in the air. When they do come down, it’s at a speed almost equal to their velocity when they leave the gun’s muzzle, Sjoquist said.

“At that velocity, it’s almost a sure thing that you’re going to have a death,” Sjoquist said.

Bernardi has presented the police department with $70,000 in discretionary funds from his office budget to pay for extra police patrols in his Northeast Valley district. Some of the money will pay for stepped-up patrols Saturday night and this coming New Year’s Eve in neighborhoods around the Shelter Isle park, Sjoquist said.

Fatality Noted

Police are distributing about 7,000 flyers titled, “It’s a Deadly Celebration.” The flyer recounts the 1986 death of Dean Morgan, a 13-year-old South-Central Los Angeles youth who was hit by a bullet as he stood near a group of people celebrating New Year’s Eve by firing shots into the air. Police also are urging local “Neighborhood Watch” groups to pass the word about the danger.

Police surmise that many of the bullets penetrating the park in the past several years have come from two nearby public-housing projects--Van Nuys Pierce Park Apartments and San Fernando Gardens, Sgt. Gary Merrifield said.

No deaths from holiday bullets have been recorded in the San Fernando Valley, but residents of the 250-home trailer park report some close calls.

“We had come home from bingo,” Bessie Nickle, 82, said of an incident six years ago with her late husband. “We were sitting at the table and we were having coffee, and he said, ‘I think I’ll take mine and go watch TV.’ He wasn’t gone more than five minutes before a bullet came right through the kitchen and hit right where he was sitting.”

Last July 4, Bineau said, she heard two shots and found a slug on her patio. But, compared to a neighbor who found a bullet hole in her bathroom, “we did pretty well last year,” she said.

Connie Teague, 70, was pleased at the display of concern by Bernardi and the police. But she remained unconvinced that the effort will effect much change.

“I doubt it,” she said. “They’ve done this before.”