Gunfire Kills 1, Injures 1 at Cambodian Celebration : Crime: As a group of young people observed the beginning of the Year of the Horse, shots were fired through a kitchen window by a person or persons unseen.

At least one gunman opened fire early Sunday into a town house where some two dozen young men and women were celebrating the Cambodian New Year, killing one man and injuring another, police said.

Witnesses to the 2 a.m. attack in the 100 block of South Fairview Street said the unseen assailant or assailants fired through a kitchen window as people milled about inside a town house following the New Year’s festivities. Neither police nor the witnesses could establish a motive in the attack, and police had no suspects Sunday.

“This could’ve happened to anybody,” said Sothy Sok, 21, a picture framer and one of five young Cambodian men who rent the three-bedroom townhouse.

Samuen Phal, 19, of San Bernardino was pronounced dead at the scene after being shot twice in the back, while Keachhay Gauv, 17, of Paramount suffered a bullet wound to the upper right arm and was treated and released at Garden Grove Medical Center, police said.

Sothy Sok said Sunday that the attack took place shortly after the group gathered at his townhouse to continue a Cambodian New Year celebration in which they had all participated Saturday and early Sunday at an Indochinese temple in Long Beach.

Southern Californians of Cambodian ancestry had marked the start of the Cambodian New Year--the Year of the Horse--on Saturday. The New Year, which was celebrated over a period of three days beginning Friday, is a symbolic time of renewal in the Cambodian community, according to Rifka Harsch, executive director of The Cambodian Family, a nonprofit, community-based organization.

“It’s a time for all the bad to be forgotten,” Rifka Harsch had said in an interview last week.

On Sunday, Sothy Sok and nine other young men who had attended the ill-fated celebration at his home recalled the shooting incident.

Sothy Sok said that the celebrants were standing around the ground-level living room of the two-story residence, talking and munching on sandwiches. There was no music, he said, and most of the party-goers were tired and ready to go home.

He said that Samuen Phal was cooking eggs over a kitchen stove for the others to eat when the shooting began. The shooter fired fives times with a .380 automatic pistol into the glass of the closed window, through which the interior of the residence was clearly visible because the curtains were up, police and witnesses said.

“It sounded like firecrackers,” said Seth Koe, 17, of Santa Ana.

Two of the bullets struck Samuen Phal, a third lodged in the biceps of Keachhay Gauv’s arm as he stood a short distance away in the living room and at least one of the others smashed into a wide-screen television set that was on at the time, Sothy Sok said.

Keachhay Gauv collapsed to the floor, holding his arm, while everyone else in the room who had not been hit dived for cover. Sothy Sok said he ran to Phal and held him as he died.

“I held him for two minutes before he died,” said Sothy Sok, a Cambodian national who was brought to the United States in 1981 by an uncle after his father and two brothers were killed by the Khmer Rouge. “I asked him where he was shot and he said two times in the stomach. But after he died and I turned him over, I found there were two bullets in his back.”

Sothy Sok and the others in the residence said they never saw who fired the shots, or heard whether they drove or ran away. Neighbors said all they heard were gunshots, but they added that gunfire is so common in the neighborhood that they thought little of it.

One man who asked not to be identified said he walked past Sothy Sok’s house about half an hour before the shooting. “You could see them in there partying and there were cars everywhere,” the neighbor said.

* SLAYING: The manager of a Vietnamese restaurant killed an alleged bandit. B2