Outrage Over the Innocents : Violence: When four children died of gunshot wounds in New York City, the entire city rose up in anger and pain. But when four youngsters died in L.A. and Orange counties, the reaction was far more restrained. Why the difference?

The image of 9-year-old Veronica Corales peered from New York newsstands with large dark eyes and a smile so innocent that she could subdue even the most shrill tabloid’s front page. Still, the headlines screamed:

STRAY SHOT HITS GIRL . . . HER GREAT ADVENTURE ENDS IN TRAGEDY . . . SLEEPING GIRL SHOT IN HEAD.

So began a wave of tragedy this summer, heightened by media attention, that baffled even those New Yorkers accustomed to living with violence. Little children shot and killed by random gunfire.

By August, the city was wrapped up in a collective outrage, shouted in the tabloid headlines:

CHILDREN IN THE WAR ZONE . . . IT’S NOT DODGE CITY, BUT . . ..

Maybe it was just a slow news period that slotted little Veronica as the first victim of what Newsday later called the “slaughter of innocents.”

But more deaths came, one after the other. The ages of the victims became impossibly young: A 3-year-old shot as he slept on a fold-out bed; a 9-month-old killed as he sat in a walker in his grandmother’s kitchen.

The city cried out, to the police, to Mayor David Dinkins: Do something!

But while New York anguished over its “littlest victims,” the summer has been almost as grisly in Southern California:

* A 6-year-old girl was shot by an angry 17-year-old gang member at a birthday party in South-Central Los Angeles.

* A 10-year-old Wilmington boy was shot accidentally while he played with a gun belonging to his gang-member uncle.

* A 12-year-old boy was shot on a Santa Ana street after a drug deal soured; the boy had nothing to do with that deal.

Where, then, is Southern California’s outrage--the headlines, the grief, the uproar? Except for the tears of families and friends--and a few tightly written or produced newspaper and TV stories--Los Angeles and Orange County have not reacted with the collective intensity that New Yorkers have.

The anguish is here, as sure as the increase in gang-related crime, police and media watchers say.

But, they add, how New York and Los Angeles deal with children’s shootings is as different as the cities themselves. The reaction, experts say, has been affected by such factors as:

* Communities in New York are not separated by miles of interstate.

* Competing tabloid newspapers there sell fast and furious, mostly on pedestrian rush-hour streets.

* And, most importantly, although at least four Southern California children were fatally shot in one month, the area has not recorded the consecutive tally of child shootings--four dead in nine days--that sparked New Yorkers’ fury.

Where neighborhood violence--particularly gang violence--is concerned, it’s becoming a banner year in Southern California.

Gang violence, according to figures released last month by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, increased 69% in the first eight months of 1990 over last year.

Overall violent crime, the report says, is up 20%.

And, as always, shootings often involve innocent bystanders--families who learn duck-and-cover techniques the way most Southern Californians practice earthquake drills. Marie Felix, of the Gang Violence Reduction Project in East Los Angeles, reports that as many as 60% of victims of gang-related crime are bystanders.

In New York so far this year, six of the 16 innocent bystanders killed by random bullets were children under 16. In 1988, homicide was the fifth cause of death of youngsters 14 and younger in New York City.

Although the New York Police Department has no statistics distinguishing children intentionally slain and those killed by stray bullets, one police spokeswoman suggested that misdirected gunfire accounted for only a handful of victims.

Similarly, in Los Angeles County, cases of children struck down by gunfire are not filed under the circumstances of the shooting.

“They’re all homicides,” said a Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department spokesman. Still, according to coroners in Los Angeles and Orange counties, 91 children under 13 were homicide victims in 1989; of these, 30 were killed by gunfire. Authorities do not tally how many were gang- or drug-related.

The counting occurs when newspapers and television reporters add up homicide totals--and fuel public outcry by portraying related events as crime waves.

Police here maintain that residents get angry--and often call their offices seeking solutions to violence, whether the crime occurs in their neighborhood or not.

“There is some apathy (in the public) towards crime, but to what degree, I think, depends on the community and the circumstances,” said Lt. Robert Helton of the Santa Ana Police Department.

With the killing of an innocent child, like Pedro Sanchez Hernandez, 12, in Santa Ana Aug. 14,the outcry increases, he added.

Hernandez, struck down by gunfire stemming from an unsuccessful drug deal, was simply walking down his neighborhood street with his brother, Gus, 16.

Gus said he heard someone yell “drive-by” and “I ducked behind a car and I yelled for my brother to follow. I saw this car go by and then I heard four shots. I looked for my brother and there he was, dead.”

“There, the (public’s) outcry was obvious to us,” Helton said. “As the age of the victim decreases, the public speaks louder.”

And, it seems, nowhere was it louder this summer than in New York, where the killings began to overlap. Hardly was one child buried before the media told of another shooting.

To firebrand columnists like Jim Dwyer of Newsday, the children are “a defining issue” for New York. “If you’re dead to this issue, you’re dead to all existence,” he said.

Most members of the New York press agree that the wave of public outrage over crime was picking up momentum far before Veronica was killed. The succession of child killings was “like a tornado touching down,” Dwyer said.

New York’s three tabloids--the New York Post, the New York Daily News and Newsday--each repeatedly ran stories about the killings on their front pages. As papers that rely heavily on street sales to pedestrians in transit, the tabloids are often accused of pulling no stops to sell papers.

But as the killings progressed, even the staid New York Times ran front-page stories on the public outrage surrounding the deaths.

Broadcasters also joined in the coverage. Where the tabloids were “expectedly sensational,” said Dr. Everette Dennis, director of the Gannett Media Studies Center at Columbia University, “television has been breathlessly sensational” in covering the same story.

In New York, the media may have treated the young victims in so spectacular a fashion because other big stories seemed to have run their course, Dennis said. There was not much more to report at the time on the Central Park Jogger case; Donald Trump’s financial woes had become old news; at the same time, the media had a heightened interest in the plight of urban children because of the Lisa Steinberg child abuse case.

The journalistic gridlock broke with this summer’s consecutive killings of children, Dennis said.

Politicians, particularly Dinkins, became the media’s prime targets. Dwyer, the first to ask Dinkins what he would do to protect New York’s children from such senseless killings as Veronica Corales’, said he was frustrated by the mayor’s “tepid response.”

But while columnists made stinging commentaries about the city administration and Dinkins took steps--such as hiring 1,058 new police officers--the violence continued.

While crime--random drive-by shootings, in particular--has become a big, poignant even topic of news coverage in Los Angeles, there are major differences between this market and New York, experts say.

One of the chief differences is geographic sprawl. Southern Californians do not live shoulder-to-shoulder and are not confronted with competing tabloid newspapers; when reading about crime in other neighborhoods, they may feel as if it is happening in someplace far removed.

But a lack of outcry here does not reflect a lack of media attention to children’s shooting deaths, said Edwin Guthman, a USC journalism professor. “We’re dealing with two different cities,” he said. “My impression is that Los Angeles has been given a lot of local media coverage to these shootings, especially when drive-bys involve innocent people.”

While the amount of public outcry can be related to the amount of media coverage given gang warfare, Guthman said, “I don’t think Los Angeles feels as if it has been slighted. I’m certainly quite conscious of a lot of sad stories in this area. . . . I don’t think we care any less about it than New York.”

Said Santa Ana police Lt. Helton: “What’s played up in the news can bring the problem to the forefront, be the igniter of public outcry. After some of our recent violence, I wouldn’t be surprised to see outcry escalate, with the right kind of rallying point. Here though, that particular case--or cases--hasn’t come forward. We’re fortunate.”

The random shootings that so often claim the lives of children are on the increase largely because the gangs have demonstrated that they no longer care about who gets in their way, authorities say.

What Helton and other law enforcement officials, see as a growing danger is an increasing lack of remorse in gang members and drug dealers, who rarely stop to decide who should and should not be shot.

“From my experience, they (gang members) have very little if any remorse for innocent victims. When they are looking for somebody and an innocent bystander happens to wander in their path, there is no concern,” Helton said.

In East Los Angeles, neighborhood gangs once followed a time-honored tradition of not involving innocent lives in their street wars. But at the Gang Violence Reduction Project, activists are noticing that (and other traditions) are beginning to crumble.

Felix, from her work counseling current and former gang members in East Los Angeles, has noticed that “things are evolving,” in traditional neighborhood gangs. “Meaning, that we didn’t used to shoot in an area where innocents would be shot,” she said. “Now things are at the point where gang members say ‘I’m going to take care of it--if someone else gets in the way, too bad.’ ”

Sgt. Garry Adams, also of the Santa Ana police, said that even with the outcry surrounding Hernandez’s death, the public--and police--may be overwhelmed by helplessness: “There’s a certain amount of outrage, but how do you deal with it when you have random shootings such as these . . . when the gangs apparently aren’t caring about who is on the other side of the wall they are shooting at? These are our questions to answer first, before anything can be done.”

Loretta Jones, of the Youth and Family Center in Inglewood, has watched news from New York with interest--and sees parallels between New York and Los Angeles.

“I think it’s a disease, starting with drugs, but certainly including everything else--gangs, guns, violence,” she said. “We are in need of new healing.”

To that end, a new Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment made up of community action groups from all across Los Angeles, along with USC, UCLA and the Department of Justice, has formed to reduce violence in crime-ridden areas.

“People are afraid. I don’t think anybody learns to live with this or accept it as part of life,” Jones said. “There are many community programs around. But they become so fragmented after awhile, and far apart--we are trying to change that.

“These bullets, coming through the walls and hitting innocent people . . . people are really afraid of guns,” Jones said. “We as a people--and I as a mother--are enraged at what’s going on in our community. We are going to have to find a way to heal.

“And we are going to have to do it for ourselves. In that way, we’re no different from New York or anywhere else.”

Times Staff Writer John Needham contributed to this story.

VICTIMS OF DEADLY DAYS

L.A. / Orange Counties

* Jacqueline Aguilera, 8, shot and severely wounded by random gunfire Aug. 16 in her South-Central L.A. neighborhood. She was watching TV in the living room when shooting started.

* Adrian Barajas, 10, accidentally killed Aug. 4 in Wilmington while he and a cousin played with a gun belonging to a relative, later charged with being a gang member.

* Pedro Sanchez Hernandez, 12, killed Aug. 14 in drug-related shooting while walking on a Santa Ana street with his older brother.

* Emiliano Landa, 12, shot and killed Aug. 27 by gang-related gunfire as he sat on his bicycle talking to friends in his Norwalk neighborhood.

New York

* Veronica Corales, 9, just back from a trip to the Great Adventure amusement park in New Jersey, was shot in the head July 22 by a stray bullet as she slept next to her mother in the family car.

* Yaritimi Fruto, 1, was shot in the head by the same bullet that killed his father, as the family drove through Brooklyn July 24.

* Rayvon Jamison, 9 months, shot and killed as he sat in a walker in a Bronx apartment, July 31.

* Ben (Shulka) Williams, 3, was killed and his sister sleeping beside him on a fold-out bed was wounded, when a gunman sprayed the apartment door with 18 bullets on July 27 in Brooklyn.