Aftermath of Murder Still Stuns : Courts: Prosecutors are shocked by probation sentence for 17-year-old involved in the killing of a 5-year-old girl. She was shot while playing outside.

Now that it is all wrapped up, nothing about the murder of Ashley Johnson turned out to be routine.

Ashley was a 5-year-old girl, shot through the heart at twilight last November as she played hopscotch, waiting for the cake and ice cream at a family birthday party.

Six days after that, the man who allegedly shot her, a gang member nicknamed “Little Popeye,” killed himself in a friend’s bedroom as law enforcement officers closed in on him.

Last week, the 17-year-old accused of driving the car as Little Popeye took half a dozen shots at the house with the children in front of it pleaded guilty to murder in Juvenile Court.

In part because of letters and petitions from neighbors and ministers, he would not be imprisoned, but instead sentenced to “home on probation.” That means he will live at home and report to a probation officer for as long as eight years.

People were stunned by Ashley’s murder; then they were stunned by Little Popeye’s suicide.

Now, deputy district attorneys and a homicide detective say they are stunned by the sentence, which released the 17-year-old to his family Wednesday. He had been in custody since the day after the shooting.

“To me what he’s getting doesn’t even come close to fitting the nature of the crime,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Chuck Merritt.

Merritt went to the hospital that Saturday in November; he saw a 5-year-old child lying there “with her hair done up in bows from a birthday party,” and a bullet hole through her chest.

The time the youth spent in custody “is no time, considering the life of a 5-year-old girl who’s just playing in her yard and being shot down that way,” said Merritt. “I have a hard time dealing with this.”

Gregory D. Jennings, a deputy district attorney assigned to the hard-core gang division, handled this case, which he called a “very vicious crime.” He had asked that the teen-ager be sent to the California Youth Authority until he is 25. “Even that may not have been enough, to be frank,” said Jennings. But “he should have received no less than the CYA.”

Jennings’ boss is Michael Genelin, head deputy district attorney for the hard-core gangs group. “It is, to say the least, a very rare event when a judge under these circumstances gives ‘home on probation’ when it’s a first-degree murder admission,” said Genelin. The teen-ager’s plea is technically called “admitting the petition.”

Neither the Juvenile Court judge nor the teen-ager’s attorney would speak to The Times about the sentence.

Genelin noted “some mitigating factors in this case, and certainly the judge took them into account”:

The young man’s mother is confined to a wheelchair. Letters and petitions attesting to his worth and possibilities were submitted to the court from residents of the same streets and neighborhoods often victimized by gangs.

The teen-ager wrote letters himself, explaining his career goals. His criminal record was “absolutely minimal,” said Genelin; he was not a confirmed gang member and he was not the shooter.

He expressed remorse about Ashley’s death, and about Little Popeye’s suicide--unlike the man Jennings prosecuted last week. He, too, was a teen-ager behind the wheel in a drive-by killing, and when the judge asked that man, “How do you feel about the victim?” he turned and looked levelly at the dead man’s mother and said: “Hey, I have no remorse for him.” The man was sentenced to three consecutive life terms.

Nonetheless, said Genelin, “we also have to take into account that we are dealing with a young girl who was killed, was murdered, wantonly murdered.”

Under standard probation terms, the teen-ager must keep up his grades in school, and stay away from the gang turf where he was living at the time; his family has since moved away from that neighborhood. If he violates any law, said Jennings, “he will go to the CYA. The judge was clear.”

Anthony Johnson is Ashley’s father. He is still a gardener at the housing project where he was working when his youngest child was shot. “I thought about leaving, at least maybe out to the suburbs, but I was born in L.A. and it’s hard to run.”

Ashley’s father knew who Little Popeye was, and he knows this teen-ager and his family. The teen-ager’s sister, he said, came to Ashley’s funeral and cried inconsolably.

Los Angeles’ neighborhoods can be like small villages; there is every chance he may see the teen-ager again. If he does, he said, “I don’t know how he’s gonna feel about it. I don’t know how I’m gonna feel about it.”

He sees children Ashley’s age every day. He tells them to stay in school, and he gives them nickels and dimes for candy.

As for the sentencing, “It bothers you, but what can you do about it? . . . Everybody that kills somebody like that shouldn’t even be on the streets.”

And yet, “I know it doesn’t do any good to have vengeance, because that’s part of the problem--to kill somebody for killing somebody; it’s never gonna stop.” When he thinks of the shooter, when he thinks of the driver, “I more or less just tried to pray for them.”

Other children have died in gunfire since Ashley Johnson. The latest of them, 11-year-old Alejandro Vargas, was shot and killed last Tuesday beneath the flagpole on his Compton schoolyard, in sight of the school office.

Elizabeth Wilson is Ashley’s cousin; it was in front of her house that the child was playing when she was shot. Wilson moved out of town two months ago, in no small part because of all the bleeding and dying that finally found its way to her front yard.

“I just heard on the news yesterday about the 11-year-old boy in Compton hit by a stray bullet,” she said. “And I thought of Ashley. I did.”