Passing Car Fires Into Birthday Party; Girl, 5, Is Killed

A 5-year-old South-Central Los Angeles girl, playing outside in the dusk while waiting for cake and ice cream at her cousins’ birthday party, was shot and killed Saturday in an apparent drive-by shooting.

Ashley Johnson was one of several children, none of them older than 8, who were playing hopscotch and leaping about in front of Sammie Wilson’s house when a car rolled by.

“They started shooting. She tried to get up and run into the house . . . they all know to run, even the little kids know to run . . . and they shot her,” said Wilson, whose cousin is the child’s mother. Nobody else was hurt; the other children only came away with dirty hands and knees from falling down, Wilson said.

At the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southeast Division, police said no one had been taken into custody in the shooting. They said, too, what has become standard in such occurrences, that the shooting may have been gang-related. Police gang investigators were out late Saturday night, at the shambles of the birthday party.

“There were no gangbangers around, just little kids,” Wilson said bitterly.

The party was both for Wilson’s 2-year-old son, whose birthday is today, and for her grandson, who turned 2 last week. It was about 5 p.m. and the children, anxious for the party’s grand finale, had trailed their games from the back yard out into the front.

“They were waiting for us to call them so everybody could sing ‘Happy Birthday,’ waiting for us to say ‘Come on, get some cake and ice cream,’ ” Wilson said. She and the girl’s mother were inside when they heard shots and cries.

Wilson dropped the birthday cake and ran. So did Ashley’s mother. And so did other parents who had been in back. They all raced to the front yard, “to check on their kids. They were saying “Run, run!”

A teen-age girl, a friend of Ashley’s elder sister, “scooped her up off the ground” and carried her inside, Wilson said. “And she died here, in my house.

“That’s the last we’d expect, is somebody shooting here into the kids. They just aim at kids. It could have been anybody’s kids, they don’t care. They don’t have no sympathy, no feeling.”