Mother, Baby Killed in Firebombing : Tragedy: Police suspect the act was a gang reprisal in a neighborhood that has been battered by crime.

In a crime-riddled pocket of southeast Los Angeles, where residents say wearily that they have seen it all, 13-year-old Shalonda Lewis stood on her mother’s porch Wednesday and described the lethal firebombing.

“After the shooting,” the teen-ager said calmly, “we knew something was going to happen. It was just a question of what and when.”

As she spoke, a work crew in the 1600 block of East 53rd Street boarded up the burned-out apartment where late Tuesday someone tossed an incendiary device through a window, igniting a fire that claimed the lives of a mother and her 11-month-old girl.

Authorities said the firebombing at the Pueblo del Rio housing project apparently was the work of gang members retaliating for a shooting several hours earlier in which one man was killed and another seriously wounded.

James Ford Lewis, 23, was shot and killed and a companion was wounded about 4:30 p.m. Tuesday after the men argued with a gang member at the housing project, Los Angeles Police Lt. Rick Morton said. Alfred Owens, 20, was booked for investigation of murder and was being held without bail, authorities said.

Investigators said that Owens is a relative of the woman who died in the midnight explosion and fire and of another woman whose nearby apartment was firebombed a few minutes earlier, but who was not home. Authorities did not identify the mother and infant, pending notification of their family.

Fire officials said 12 people were in the apartment where the mother and her child died. Eight escaped unharmed. A 20-year-old man and a 10-year-old boy suffered burns and were in good condition Wednesday at County-USC Medical Center, authorities said.

After putting out the fire in about 20 minutes, firefighters found the bodies of the mother and child in an upstairs bedroom, Fire Department spokesman Greg Acevedo said.

The death of the infant was the latest tragedy in recent days to befall innocent children living in dangerous neighborhoods. An 11-year-old Compton boy was killed by a stray bullet at his junior high school last week, and a 12-year-old girl from South Los Angeles was permanently paralyzed after being shot Monday outside a fast-food restaurant.

On Wednesday, residents of the graffiti-scarred complex of sprawling two-story apartment buildings described hearing loud explosions about two minutes apart, followed by loud screams.

Many residents described the firebombing and the shootings with the detachment of people accustomed to violence.

Shalonda Lewis stayed home from school not because of any trauma created by the killings, but simply because the commotion had kept her awake until 3 a.m.

“I’ve seen people shot before,” she explained, “so this kind of thing doesn’t really bother me anymore.”

Another resident said that as the explosions rocked the apartment complex, she and her three small children did as they always do when they hear gunfire in the middle of the night. “We climbed under the bed,” said Maria Cisneros, 28.

Crime in the community has become so bad that two months ago she had the ground-floor windows of her two-bedroom apartment boarded up, adding that the extra peace of mind was worth the cave-like darkness.

“This is a terrible place to live,” she said. “When they start killing little babies, you know it is bad.”