Gunshots Bark, and Death Claims a Teen-Ager

Walter Stewart had just returned home from work when his 17-year-old son asked permission to go outside for a while.

A few minutes after 9 p.m. Wednesday, Stewart heard the unnerving bark of gunshots outside his South Los Angeles home. Moments later, his sister-in-law pounded on the front door, screaming that his 17-year-old son, Walter Dale Stewart Jr., had been shot dead.

Stewart’s son would have turned 18 on Thursday--the same day that a computer training school representative called the family with news that he had been accepted into a job placement program.

Police said they did not have a suspect or a motive in the killing. The younger Stewart, a senior at Locke High School, was not believed to have been a gang member.

“Sad, huh?” muttered the victim’s mother, Olivia Stewart. “It still seems like a dream to me.”

As he sadly described the events of the preceding night, Walter Stewart Sr., 38, stared out blankly to beyond the back-yard fence of the family’s small stucco home on the 700 block of 109th Street.

“I ran around the corner and there he was with his face down on somebody’s porch. The police said, ‘He’s going to be all right.’ Maybe they should quit telling you that. I noticed he was still . . . still as a rock. It didn’t look good at all.”

Shot in Torso

South Bureau Homicide Detective Pat Marshall said Walter Stewart Jr. had been walking along Stanford Avenue near 109th Street when he was shot in the upper torso by a suspect that police could only describe as a man in his 20s.

“The victim ran 30 to 40 feet before he collapsed,” Marshall said.

The gunman was seen by witnesses getting into a brown 1979 or 1980 Chevrolet Caprice, which sped from the scene westbound on 109th Street, Marshall said. “We really don’t know why he was accosted by this suspect.”

Walter Stewart Jr. was one of four victims to die in the violence that erupted Wednesday on Los Angeles streets.

On Wednesday morning, a bloody shoot-out eight blocks from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum left two rival gang members dead and three others wounded, police said. More than 50 shots were fired in the gun battle that killed 17-year-old Edward Cory Brown, investigators said. The second victim, Jerry Knox, 33, was struck and killed by a car during the intense gunfight.

In addition, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies arrested 16 members of rival gangs involved in a rock, bottle and fist fight in an unincorporated area on Wednesday afternoon. After these arrests were made, 10 of the gang members walked to a nearby street in Los Angeles. There, in a drive-by incident, they were sprayed with bullets fired by an assailant from a rival gang, police said.

Monolita Shawn Green, 18, of Los Angeles, was hit in the back. He died of his wounds at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

Gang-related homicides citywide increased 39.3% during the first three months of this year, compared with the same period a year ago, said Police Lt. Fred Nixon. Similarly, gang-motivated crimes--those growing directly out of gang activity--increased 31.8% citywide in the first six months of this year, compared with the same period a year ago, Nixon said.

Walter Stewart Sr. needed no statistics to tell him the problem is out of control. “Parents used to run the neighborhoods; the youths run the neighborhoods now,” he said. “Whoever is supposed to be in charge of these kids has got to get back in control.”