Matriarch Pays Fatal Price for Daily Ritual : Gang violence: A stray bullet kills a 68-year-old Firestone woman as she enjoys a favorite activity--playing with a great-grandchild.

Anna Owens was a creature of habit. If not tending to the small garden she nurtured in the back of her modest home, the 68-year-old woman could be found playing with one of her 10 grandchildren and great-grandchildren on the front porch of her Firestone home. Rarely did the matriarch stray from her routine, family and friends said Friday.

On Thursday evening, however, Owens paid the price for her daily ritual. The unintended victim of a drive-by shooting, the doting grandmother was shot and killed on her front porch as she cradled her 9-month-old great-granddaughter in her arms. The baby, narrowly missed by bullets, was not injured.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said two carloads of rival gang members were passing Owens’ house in the 1200 block of East 89th Street when the occupants of one of the cars began firing shots at the occupants of the other.

All three shots went astray. Owens, sitting on the porch with her son, Walter Owens Jr., and her great-granddaughter, Olisha, was struck in the chest.

Authorities were searching for suspects in the incident on Friday as Owens’ family and friends struggled to deal with her death.

“She was just sitting on the porch playing with the baby when we heard the cars go by,” Walter Owens said. “Then I heard three shots and my mother said, ‘He shot me.’ I just held her till she died.”

The son, who spent Friday afternoon making funeral arrangements, said his mother was a normally reserved woman who had a great love for children and young people.

“Let me put it this way: My mother could raise hell with the best of them,” he said as he sat on the front porch where Owens was slain. “But she also cared about everybody as well. People could ask her for anything and if it was in reason, she would give it to them.”

The mother of three adult children, Anna Owens was also raising three grandchildren at the time of her death. She had lived in the neighborhood for 36 years and was affectionately called “Mah-Dear,” short for “Mother Dear,” by the children in the community.

Neighbors and friends remembered the native of rural Mississippi for her fondness for family and devotion to her church.

“She was like a mother to me and I was like a daughter to her,” said Homer Jean Temple, whose mother, Vivian, was Owens’ best friend. “She’s been part of my life since I was a kid. I could talk to her about anything.”

Owens, who had three great-grandchildren, was a devoted member of the Greater New Light Baptist Church, where she served as secretary for the senior citizens Sunday school class, Vivian Temple said.

“We even had our favorite row at the church where we would sit. There was hardly a Sunday that went by that you couldn’t find Anna and I sitting there together,” Vivian Temple said.

She said the two became friends when Owens moved into the neighborhood with her late husband. “She kept my two children while I worked,” she said.

Vivian Temple called her best friend’s death a “great loss” and said she is having trouble grappling with it.

“I was sitting here (when the shots were fired) and didn’t even know she had been shot until I got a call from a friend,” she said. “It’s a tragedy. She didn’t bother anybody. She just minded her business.

“She was just a dear friend, a nice neighbor who would do anything for you,” Temple said.