Child Survives as Shots Pierce Home : Violence: 8-year-old is wounded as she sleeps. Police see no motive for gunfire in South-Central neighborhood.

The blood has dried on the living room sofa where 8-year-old Jacqueline Aguilera was nearly killed by shots that suddenly slammed through the walls and door of her parents’ South-Central Los Angeles apartment early Thursday.

“We heard shots and then her screams,” the child’s uncle, Franklin Vallecillo, 24, said, pointing out four large holes in the front door and walls, from bullets shot by unseen assailants for no apparent reason.

“She was screaming, ‘Daddy, what happened to me? What hit me?’ ” her father, David Aguilera, 28, said. “She was covered in blood.”

The long-haired child, whose dancing eyes and big grin shone from a large photograph on a wall of the East 54th Street apartment, had been seated on a red velvet sofa a few feet from the front door. She had fallen asleep watching television, her uncle and father said, when she was wounded in the cheek, arm and legs.

A spokeswoman for Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center said the child was in stable condition Thursday.

Los Angeles Police Detective Dennis Scherr said the family, immigrants from Nicaragua, had no known gang affiliations and the shooting seemed to have occurred without motive.

“We have no witnesses,” he added.

“We’ve been here four years, with no problems,” Vallecillo said. “Nothing ever happened. Never.”

When the shooting started, Jacqueline’s father, who is a construction worker, and 7-year-old brother, Dennis, were asleep in one bedroom and Vallecillo was asleep in another, he said. The child’s 26-year-old mother, Savaluz, a postal worker, was at work.

The shots rang out shortly after 12:30 a.m., Vallecillo said. When he ran to the living room, the uncle said he saw that Jacqueline had fallen from the sofa to the linoleum floor.

“We picked her up and put her on a bed and tried to calm her until the paramedics came,.” he said.

The small three-bedroom apartment had been converted from the garage of a two-story apartment building. Thin wooden panels of garage doors make up most of the outer wall of the $400-a-month unit, which faces a back alley.

Neighbors contacted Thursday said they did not know the Aguilera family.

Even though gangs are common to the area, “it’s real quiet,” Lupe Estrada, 58, said.

However, another resident said a car “throwing bullets” drove through the block about half an hour before the shooting of the child.

The building where the Aguileras live is a few doors from the location of the 1974 police shootout with members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, when publishing heiress Patty Hearst was a fugitive.