Girl Probably Shot by Gang, Authorities Say

Police said Monday that they believe a 4-year-old girl who was critically injured in a drive-by shooting on Christmas Eve was an innocent victim in a flare-up between warring gangs in San Clemente and neighboring San Juan Capistrano.

San Clemente Police Sgt. Neil Murray blamed Sunday’s shooting on escalating tensions between the Barrio Chico gang of San Clemente and the San Juan Boys gang of San Juan Capistrano. He said there is no evidence that Lorena Caudillo or her family were intended as targets of violence.

The girl and her family have no links to gang activity, Murray said.

“We don’t think this was a shooting that was specifically aimed at anyone,” Murray said. “It was more an act of intimidation, something that made a general statement.”

George Manzo, 25, who lives in a neighboring apartment building, said that the hostility between the Barrio Chico and San Juan Boys gangs is widely known in the neighborhood. He said two Barrio Chico members live in Lorena Caudillo’s building and that several others live elsewhere on the block. He said he does not know their names.

But Manzo, who said he was active in a Capistrano Beach gang as a teen-ager, said he believes that the shots were not fired to hurt anyone. The Barrio Chico boys were standing nearby listening to music when the shooting occurred and could have been easily hit had their rivals intended to harm them, Manzo said.

Police believe the attack was the first drive-by shooting in San Clemente. Lorena was hit with shotgun pellets in the face, upper body and arm about 7:45 p.m. as she was standing on the balcony of a neighbor’s apartment in the 100 block of Avenida Pelayo, police said.

The child was listed in critical condition Monday at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Witnesses reported hearing men in two cars shout, “San Juan! San Juan!” at the time of the shooting and again a few minutes later, when the window in a van around the corner was shot at.

Those reports lead police to believe that the drive-by shooting is the work of the San Juan Capistrano gang, police said.

Police in San Clemente and sheriff’s deputies in San Juan Capistrano said that, in the wake of the shooting, they are patrolling with a heightened awareness of gang tensions.

Sheriff’s Lt. Larry Abbott said his deputies “will be doing a lot of stops on gang-bangers” to keep an eye on their activities and to make sure they are carrying no weapons.

“We’re taking this very seriously,” he said. “We’re looking for weapons, even baseball bats. We’ll confiscate them if we have to.”

San Clemente Police Sgt. Jim Thomas said he received a report that reputed gang members, perhaps from San Clemente, fired shots in San Juan Capistrano just hours after Lorena Caudillo was shot but that no one there was hurt.

Thomas said, “There’s no doubt in my mind” that shots being fired in San Juan Capistrano would be in retaliation for the earlier shooting.

“We think that our locals may have gone to (the San Juan Capistrano) turf and shot it up,” he said.

Thomas said San Clemente police will put more patrols in the neighborhood around the shooting to head off any attempts at further violence.

“We’ll probably step up our enforcement until the recent heat has cooled down a little bit,” he said.

A 1978 Buick believed to have been used in the attack was found Sunday night. It had been abandoned on Interstate 5 at the northern edge of San Clemente. Police interviewed several reputed gang members in the area but still have no suspects in the attack, Thomas said.

A Nissan reportedly seen in the San Clemente shooting has not been found, Murray said.

John Denayer, who lives in the neighborhood, said that the area is normally calm but that it had experienced disturbances recently that were apparently related to gang activities. A few weeks ago, for instance, Denayer said, he saw a man park briefly on his street alongside another car, smash the window with a pipe, then flee.