Bullet Fired Into Home Kills Willowbrook Boy, 11

An 11-year-old boy was fatally wounded Sunday night by a bullet fired into his Willowbrook-area home, police said.

The boy was taken to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center and was pronounced dead at 7:30 p.m., Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said.

The victim was identified by a relative as David (Cricket) Polion.

Three men were being sought in connection with the 7:10 p.m. shooting in the 11800 block of Alabama Avenue, deputies said.

Shikita Roberson, a cousin of the victim, said: “We were in the living room dancing. He was standing up. We heard a shot. And he ran to the kitchen and collapsed and began crawling.”

When authorities arrived, they found the boy collapsed in a hallway with a bullet wound in the upper back.

Vernell Davis, the victim’s stepfather, said he was asleep in the back of the house at the time. The boy’s mother, Cynthia Johnson, was ironing her son’s clothes for school.

Roberson said someone called 911 and paramedics arrived and took the boy to the hospital.

According to witnesses in the neighborhood and sheriff’s investigators, the shooting erupted at the corner of 118th Place and Compton Avenue, with the bullet that struck the boy traveling about 100 yards before smashing into the living room. The bullet had passed through a window near a recently decorated Christmas tree.

Sheriff’s Sgt. Frank Salerno said the shooting “definitely was gang-related, but we do not feel that this house or this boy was the subject of the shooting.”

One teen-age girl, who declined to give her name, said that earlier Sunday some youths in the neighborhood “warned other kids that The Slobs (an area gang) are coming tonight and they’ll be shooting. They came and they shot.”