An Eerie Quiet Descends on Campus as Students Try to Cope With Slaying

Police patrols were increased and the usual boisterous student shouts dropped to somber murmurs Wednesday at Millikan Junior High School in Sherman Oaks, a day after a 14-year-old boy was gunned down in a gang shooting there--an event almost routine at some schools but a deadly first at the usually peaceful suburban campus.

Some students, shaken by a firsthand lesson in the danger of being young in Los Angeles, worried about being mistaken for a gang member and ending up in the morgue. Others talked about hitting the floor at the sound of gunfire. One girl told a school counselor that she worries that her jailed boyfriend might meet a violent end, because she now realizes that youths her age can be killed.

Locker doors, usually slammed shut, were closed gently. Students who generally horse around noisily between classes walked slowly and quietly from room to room.

“It’s been eerily quiet,” ninth-grade counselor Wendy Eller said.

Alejandro Penaloza died Tuesday about an hour after a single bullet ripped through his chest as he stood with several students on the northeast corner of the campus, at Magnolia Boulevard and Sunnyslope Avenue.

It was the first act of fatal violence at the campus of 1,600 students that prides itself on polite, high-achieving students, Principal Ernest Scarcelli said.

Extra police patrols around the school were added Wednesday to ease the fears of parents and students. Counselors talked to students and teachers about the reality of death. Early classes were taken up with discussions of the shooting, trying to sort rumor from fact.

According to police, these are the facts: A man in a lowered white pickup truck pulled up and called Alejandro over. Seconds later the boy was lying in a pool of blood on the pavement, a small-caliber bullet in his chest, and the truck was speeding away. The driver and a passenger were still being sought Wednesday.

Students said later that they remembered seeing the truck several times in recent days.

School nurse Susan Suranyi said she was chatting with other school employees when a vice principal ran in and said a student had been shot. “We just ran out there as fast as we could,” Suranyi said.

A school nurse for 15 years, Suranyi checked Alejandro’s pulse, found none and began administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation, a procedure that she had practiced year after year but never actually used on a student.

Detectives said Tuesday that Alejandro was a gang member, but backed away from that statement Wednesday. “I prefer just to say that he is the 14-year-old victim of a gang-related shooting,” Lt. Warren Knowles said, adding that investigators believe that Alejandro was the intended target.

Several students at the school said Alejandro was a gang member. Flowers and a piece of paper bearing the letters “R.I.P.” were placed at the corner where he died.

Millikan administrators tried to ensure that life went on.

The school band performed the annual spring concert Wednesday evening at the school auditorium, although music instructor Sarah Kang had to reassure some parents that their children would be safe staying late. The Parent Teacher Student Assn. held its end-of-the-year meeting, although the agenda was changed from routine matters to providing as much information about the death as possible.

“The quicker we get back to business as usual, the better off we are,” Scarcelli said.

Scarcelli speaks from experience. Last year, when he was principal at Sylmar High School, eight of the school’s students died in shootings, car crashes and suicides.

Millikan teachers and parents said Tuesday’s shooting was an aberration. “This was an isolated situation, and I hope it stays isolated,” said Pam Maury, president of the school’s PTSA. “I hope this is the end of it.”

But it will take time. Students said the death has left them jumpy.

“The moment I knew it was tense was at lunch,” Tony Robinson, 15, of Van Nuys said. “We were playing basketball and a truck backfired. Two people dove to the ground and all of us flinched.”

Times staff writer Jim Herron Zamora contributed to this article.