Boy Showing Off Gun Shoots, Kills a Friend : Tragedy: The two Santa Ana 13-year-olds were home alone. Police call death an apparent accident.

A 13-year-old boy who was showing his father’s gun to a friend Tuesday fired a fatal shot into the other teenager’s head, apparently by accident, police said.

Marcos Antonio Lara, also 13, died in the emergency room of Western Medical Center-Santa Ana shortly after the 2:50 p.m. shooting, which occurred in the 800 block of South Broadway.

Tuesday night, more than 20 family members and neighbors gathered at the Laras’ Santa Ana home, expressing their condolences to his mother.

“He was a good student, used to go to the Boys’ Club,” said Marcos’ uncle, Angel Bustos, 22. “We’ll all miss him.”

Lara’s friend apparently had invited him to his house after school to look at his father’s recently acquired Colt .357 revolver. The two seventh-graders walked the short distance from Lathrop Intermediate School to the boy’s house. No adults were home at the time.

“The youth retrieved the gun from his father’s bedroom and, upon walking into the living room, aimed the gun at the victim, firing one round,” Santa Ana Police Lt. Robert Helton said. “The youth has indicated to the investigators that he didn’t know the gun was loaded.”

Bustos confirmed the police account.

“I think they were good friends,” Bustos said. “Marcos was always going to his house. He always wanted to go there after school.”

Bustos said that according to police, the boys “went to a room, and the little kid told him he had a gun. Marcos asked him if it was loaded, and he said, ‘No, it’s not loaded. Look.’ ”

Police said they were not certain where the gun was kept in the bedroom.

“After realizing that (Lara) had been shot, the youth called 911,” Helton said. When police arrived, the shooter was still on the phone talking to the operator.

“Given the nature of the victim’s wound, I’m not sure there was much more he could’ve done,” Helton said.

The boy, whose name was not released because of his age, was taken to the police station for questioning but was later released.

“We don’t know if there is more to this than meets the eye . . . (but) right now we’re going under the premise that this is an accidental shooting,” Helton said.

He said the boys got the weapon out of “curiosity. . . . The father had had the gun only about five days.” Helton said the father had borrowed the gun from a friend after his house was burglarized last week.

The boys’ parents, who also were not identified, returned home Tuesday afternoon to find more than a dozen police officers investigating the scene that had been cordoned off with yellow police tape.

“They were bewildered, saddened, in a state of disbelief,” Helton saied. “They had kind of a lost look on their faces.”

Friends and family members described Marcos as a good student with a keen interest in sports. Born in Acapulco, he came to the United States about five years ago, Bustos said.

He lived in Santa Ana with his mother and brother, and his father remained in Mexico. Marcos learned English and made friends quickly, his uncle said. He played basketball and video games often with his friends and his younger brother, Alfredo, who is 9.

“We go right over there,” Alfredo said Tuesday night, pointing to the stores a block away from the family home.

The shooting appears to be the latest in a series of accidental teen-age shootings the county has witnessed the past two years. At least two youths have been killed and three others wounded in such shootings.

“There has been a spate of those kinds of (shootings) in Orange County,” said Assemblyman Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove), who is co-sponsor of a pending bill that would hold gun owners criminally responsible if children are injured or killed as a result of negligent storage of the weapon.

On Tuesday, the bill passed the Public Safety Committee by a vote of 4 to 0, he said.

“It’s a tragic coincidence,” Umberg said.

Times staff writer Henry Chu contributed to this report.