Gang Shooting Wounds Boy, 17, at Washington High

A 17-year-old student was wounded on the campus of George Washington Preparatory High School in Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon in what authorities said was a gang-related shooting.

Richard Earvin, identified by a school district spokesman as an 11th-grader at the Athens-area school, was wounded in the head and abdomen in a burst of at least four shots, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said.

The teen-ager underwent surgery at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center and was in critical condition, hospital officials said.

Witnesses reported that three young men were seen running from the school grounds shortly after the 2:30 p.m. shooting.

Deputy Mary Landreth said Earvin and a male companion had been talking to a girl on campus when “they encountered several members of a rival gang, who are not students” at Washington High.

“There were words exchanged, and then he (Earvin) was shot,” Landreth said.

At the hospital Thursday evening, a young woman who declined to give her name but who identified herself as Earvin’s older sister, denied that the young man was a gang member.

“He just went to school like he was supposed to every day,” she said.

Earvin was outside in a sixth-period physical education class when he was shot, she said.

The woman criticized what she said is lax campus security at Washington, complaining that when she has gone there to pick up her brother, “the gate is wide open.”

School officials were unavailable for comment late Thursday.

The shooting came a day after David B. Michels, co-chair of the Los Angeles Unified School District school safety and security task force resigned, charging that the district is not moving quickly enough to improve school safety.