Youth Shot --and Death List Grows

There’s a different sort of roster at George Washington Preparatory High School on West 110th Street--a list containing more than 500 names of students, former students and their friends and relatives who have died violently in recent years.

On Monday, they prepared to add another name.

Witnesses said that about 12:10 p.m., a lone gunman--probably a gang member--drove by in a car and shot 17-year-old student Fernando Avalos to death as he stood on the sidewalk outside the school in the unincorporated Athens area west of Watts.

“It’s just another drive-by shooting,” Reesheyma Acrey, 17, a fellow student, said with a shrug.

Guillermo Soriano, 17, a student and friend of the dead youth, said Avalos had been involved in a fight with members of a new street gang in the area last Thursday.

“They came to get back at him,” Soriano said. “You’re walking with him one day, and the next day he’s dead.”

“It’s not going to stop,” said another student, who declined to give his name. “His friends know who did it.”

Washington Prep gained national attention in 1986 when a television movie aired on its former principal, George McKenna, who is now Inglewood’s superintendent of schools.

Current Principal Larry B. Higgins said Avalos, a senior who transferred to the high school last month, had not attended classes for more than two weeks.

According to Eddie Rodriguez, a 16-year-old sophomore, Avalos had stopped by the school on Monday to “talk to some girls. He was just kicking back when . . . a car came by and started blasting.”

A lone gunman in the car shouted out the name of a local gang before firing once at Avalos, who was standing with a group of friends just outside the schoolyard fence, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Van Mosley said. No one else was injured in the attack.

The witnesses said the car sped away after the shooting, and sheriff’s homicide investigators said no suspects were in custody.

Higgins, in an announcement over the school’s public address system, noted that Avalos was standing outside the school grounds when the attack took place. He told students that the shooting was “a message that your safety is at risk if you are not on campus during school hours.”

The principal said the roster, displayed in a glass case in the lobby at the entrance of the school, was posted there to draw attention to the violence that is sweeping through the community.

“It’s like our own Vietnam Memorial,” Higgins said.