17-Year-Old in Pickup Shot to Death in Santa Ana : Drive-by: Gangs are suspected in the girl’s slaying. Another teen-ager is in critical condition in a separate shooting.

Like many 17-year-olds, there were two things that mattered to Elizabeth Miranda: getting her driver’s license and graduating from high school.

But her teen-age dreams were shattered Friday by a group of suspected gang members armed with a grudge and a gun.

Elizabeth was fatally wounded in the chest by a flurry of gunfire from a passing car as she sat in the back of a pickup truck parked in front of a friend’s West Chestnut Avenue home. She died an hour later at a hospital.

The slaying was the third shooting reported in Santa Ana in the first week of the new year, police officials said. As of late Saturday, there had been no arrests in any of them.

Late Saturday, more than a dozen relatives and friends gathered on the lawn outside the modest Santa Ana home that Elizabeth had shared with her mother, sister and two brothers. They grieved for a teen-ager they described as “full of life.”

“She went to school and she baby-sat,” said a sister who asked not to be identified. “She was not into gangs. She was always at home.”

Family members said Elizabeth was an 11th-grader attending a continuing education program at a school that they would not identify.

“She was so happy, because she was going to get her license and her graduation ring,” Elizabeth’s sister said. “But someone took that away from her.”

The night she was shot, Elizabeth was sitting in the pickup with six other people, including her two brothers and a cousin, family members said.

They said the group had just returned from the store.

“We were parked, and this car stopped real slowly and just started shooting,” said a brother who asked not to be identified. “We all ducked, and when we got up, I said, ‘Is everybody OK?’ That’s when she looked inside her jacket and said, ‘I’ve been hit.’

“I held her in my lap and told her I loved her, but she kept fainting on me,” he said.

Elizabeth’s companions rushed her in the pickup to Western Medical Center-Santa Ana. She was pronounced dead about 10:45 p.m. Friday, about an hour after the shooting, Santa Ana Police Sgt. Bob Clark said. No one else was injured.

On Saturday, residents of the tree-lined residential street nervously discussed the shooting, refusing to identify themselves for fear of gang retaliation.

Many said shooting is all too common on the street, which is several blocks south of the Santa Ana Civic Center in a mostly Latino neighborhood of wood-frame row houses.

“We usually hear shots every night, it’s normal,” said one man, who lives a few houses from the murder scene. “Sometimes they kill somebody, sometimes they don’t. It’s just too many kids with guns.”

They said the shooting was the second such attack at the house in four months. Two bullet holes in the front window of the blue-and-white, single-story home were a reminder of that earlier attack.

Some residents said the shootings are part of a longstanding rivalry between two gangs.

Julia Silva, 14, who lives at the house where the shooting occurred, said she and a friend were sitting in her bedroom when she heard a series of loud pops outside. Some witnesses said the weapon may have been a semiautomatic weapon or a machine gun.

“I got down on the floor,” Julia said. “We just stayed inside because my mom told me to.”

Police dispatched at least six police cars and a helicopter to West Chestnut Street. Investigators cordoned off the area while they investigated and interviewed witnesses.

“They went knocking from door to door,” a teen-age neighbor said. “They were all over the place. The helicopter was shining its light everywhere.”

Meanwhile, police said they had no suspects. While they suspect that the shooting was related to gang activity, they said they do not know whether the victim was a gang member.

The incident was the second time in two days that gang violence has harmed a 17-year-old victim.

On Wednesday, Martha Anaya was wounded in the head by a single bullet when an unidentified gunman shot through the rear window of a car in which she was riding with friends.

She was taken to UCI Medical Center in Orange, where she remained in critical condition on Saturday. Police said they believe that the attack was related to gangs.

Later that night, Benjamin Rudolph English, 22, was shot in the hip as he walked down West Myrtle Street, three blocks from where Elizabeth was killed, police said. Police said they do not believe that attack was related to gangs, however.

The week of violence began on New Year’s Eve, when police reported 162 complaints of guns fired into the air. There was one reported injury. Sergio Granados, 10, suffered bullet wounds in his thigh and a hand.