Teen Can’t Escape Death in His Haven : Violence: A South L.A. youth was fatally wounded by gang members. He was shot outside a store that was his temporary refuge from neighborhood violence.

The Tianguis Video Store was more than a hangout spot for Pedro Sandoval. It was a refuge, a temporary haven from the despair and violence besieging his South Los Angeles neighborhood.

He played computer games there. He met friends there. He even spent time with his father there.

But on Wednesday, the violence invaded Pedro’s hideaway, and the 15-year-old was gunned down there.

Pedro was shot in the head by a group of gang members on bicycles as he stood with friends just outside the video store in the 2500 block of South Central Avenue, said Los Angeles Police Detective Eric Campos on Thursday. The youth died later at County-USC Medical Center. His friends were not hurt in the incident.

Police arrested four suspects, ages 14 to 16, shortly after the killing, Campos said.

“It looks like it was gang-related,” the detective said. “One gang member decided to take out a guy from the other side.”

But Pedro’s family and friends insisted Thursday that the slain youth was not in a gang.

“He knew people in gangs,” said friend Alberto Sanchez, 18, “but he wasn’t in one. He just got along with them. He got along with almost everybody. I know. We were close friends.”

Sanchez said he and Pedro had been chased by the suspects only three weeks before the slaying, but he insisted that it was not because they were gang members.

“They didn’t want us in their territory, over by 22nd Street,” he said. “We weren’t doing anything.”

In the living room of Pedro’s house, family members sat quietly in a semicircle, saddened and stunned. The victim’s mother, Noemi Sandoval, slowly rocked back and forth on a couch, sobbing as she clutched a recent photo of her son.

Tears streamed silently down the cheeks of one aunt. Another buried her face in the shoulder of a small child she was holding. A 16-year-cousin struggled to make sense of the killing.

“We’re not angry,” said the cousin, Nancy Lopez. “We’re just hurt--and confused. We don’t know why someone would do this.

“He was not a gang member. We’ve had relatives in gangs, and he saw what happened to their lives. That was his experience. He knew not to join a gang,” she said

Nancy described her cousin, a ninth-grade student at Carver Junior High School, as bright and funny.

“He just went to school and came home,” she said. “He stayed in the yard with his friends. He wasn’t into hanging out a lot.”

But when he did, she said, Pedro was almost sure to be found at the video store.

“He would go up there a lot, most of the time with his father,” she said. “They would just talk and look for movies. They liked going together.”

The youth’s sister, Elizabeth, 13, said her brother liked to draw “comic book heroes” and bake.

Although relatives conceded that Pedro was only an average student, they said he had recently developed a passion for writing.

“He told me he had written a poem, a beautiful poem,” his mother said. “He said it was going to be published in the school newspaper.

“He told me he was going to read it to me today.”