Students Testify to Specter of Gangs : Hearing: City Terrace pupils tell a state Senate panel of everyday lives haunted by random violence.

Sabrina Cota and her friend Marina Serrano were walking home from Belvedere Junior High School to change clothes for cheerleading practice when bullets suddenly started whizzing by.

One group of gang members was firing on a rival. The two 13-year-old girls were momentarily trapped in the cross-fire.

“Don’t scream,” Marina cautioned, and the two teen-agers stood frozen, “just holding each other tight” until the shooting stopped, Sabrina recalled. Then they ran back to school, cheerleading practice forgotten.

“My heart was pounding real fast. It’s the scariest thing that ever happened to me,” Marina said. As the two girls recounted their story Wednesday outside the school auditorium, a state Senate committee inside was being told that gang gunfire is an everyday reality for many Los Angeles schoolchildren.

Students are suffering more anxiety about gangs, which are using more destructive weapons and recruiting increasingly younger children--some only 10 and 11 years old, students, teachers and administrators told the panel.

The sparsely attended hearing, sponsored by state Sen. Art Torres (D-Los Angeles), was designed to gather community and business leaders, students, teachers, administrators and police officers to document the problems and seek solutions.

Torres, chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on victims’ rights, said he chose the City Terrace-area school because seven of its students have been involved in gang-related shootings in the last nine months. In by far the most traumatic incident, an eighth-grader who police said was a gang associate was fatally shot from a passing car as he walked home from the school on Sept. 20.

The boy, Adolfo Aguirre, 13, lay dying on the sidewalk as fellow students gathered around him. He was pronounced dead a short time later at County-USC Medical Center. Two 15-year-old boys--both suspected gang members--have been arrested in the boy’s death, sheriff’s officials said.

Roberto Gallegos, who has taught English at Belvedere for 12 years, said that “schools are increasingly under siege to gangs” and called for gang-prevention classes.

Marcella Acosta, 14, a ninth-grade student senator, said her “reality is one of fears of gangs and gang violence.”

“Education is my only hope for a better life,” said Marcella, who wants to be an astronaut. “How can we get educated when shots are being fired, people are being wounded and people are being killed right in front of our eyes?”

Outside the hearing, a cluster of cheerleaders said they have much more to worry about than learning routines. Even though they try to avoid contact with gang members, wayward bullets from drive-by shootings penetrate their homes. Relatives, friends and classmates get beaten and shot, they said.

“We’re really used to it. It’s all around us. . . . Violence, killing, shootings,” said Emily Ponce, 14, a ninth-grader.

“My brother’s been threatened that if he doesn’t join a gang, they’ll shoot him,” said Sabrina Cota of her 11-year-old brother. “They’d jump him--a whole mess of guys. We don’t let him go nowhere by himself anymore. My mom takes him to and from school.”

Added Beatriz Rubio, 14, whose cousin was shot and killed: “If they shoot someone you know, it hurts. You can’t get used to them being dead. You can’t concentrate in school. You’re thinking about it all the time.”