A Good Kid in a Bad Spot Pays Dearly : Crime: 13-year-old girl was shot to death during a robbery as she visited a friend in a suspected crack house. There is no sign she was involved in drugs, but she could not escape the violence around her.

Until the night a masked gunman ordered her to lie face-down on the floor of a Pomona crack house, no one would have expected 13-year-old Shauntuanette McGowan to end her life as a casualty of the drug wars.

She was a cheerleader on her junior high pep squad, sang soprano in the church choir, took tap-dancing lessons, played the violin, designed clothes and once wrote an essay about her dream of becoming a lawyer.

But like many African-American teen-agers, the girl everyone knew as “Shay Shay” also faced the hurdles posed by a broken family, economic disadvantage and racial prejudice. Although most doubted she was involved in drugs or gangs, such troubles were well-rooted in her neighborhood. Friends tempted her with easy money, fast cars and the male affection missing from home.

“She was not part of that fringe out on the streets, but I wouldn’t say she was naive about what was going on there, either,” said Wayne Joseph, her principal at Simons Junior High School. “Unfortunately, there are many young people who figure, since they’re not involved, they have nothing to fear. She paid for it dearly.”

At 11 p.m. on June 28, a week after she graduated from eighth grade, Shay Shay went to visit 15-year-old Kelley Anderson, a former sweetheart. She met him at a gray stucco bungalow that Pomona police have described as a “crash pad and revolving door . . . where you come for your fix, get high and move on to better things.”

Within minutes of her arrival, at least two gunmen wearing ski masks kicked in the door, ordered everyone to lie face-down on the living room carpet and demanded drugs and money. Then, in an execution-style rampage, they opened fire, unloading at least 20 rounds into the backs and heads of three teen-agers and one adult.

“Somebody said, ‘Smoke ‘em all, smoke ‘em all,’ ” said Kelley’s mother, Sharmaine Shelby, who had been talking to her husband at the house by phone and overheard most of the attack. “Shay Shay started to scream. . . . It was like, it’s really for real. They’re fixing to kill (them). Then you just hear the shots. Shots and shots and shots.”

Shay Shay and Kelley died instantly. Neither had been using drugs or alcohol, according an autopsy. A 13-year-old friend, Angela Carter, who had given Shay Shay a ride, was paralyzed. So was Kelley’s stepfather, Darryl Shelby, 28. No arrests have been made.

“There was probably a moment, lying there just before they were killed, when they went, ‘Whoops, we didn’t think of this,’ ” said Pomona Police Sgt. Ron Windell. “That’s the terror. Suddenly, you realize you’re in over your head and you’re going to pay with your life.”

As the nation’s crack epidemic becomes entrenched--an estimated 500,000 Americans use crack at least once a month--those on the sidelines of the drug war are being drawn closer to the front. The schools, parks and churches are full of Shay Shays and Kelleys--street-wise kids for whom a crack house has become as natural an extension of their environment as the movie theater or shopping mall.

“The ‘good kids’ are getting sucked up in this environment as easily as what we used to refer to as the ‘bad kids,’ ” said Joyce Ladner, a sociologist at Howard University in Washington, who works with troubled adolescents. “A lot of those getting caught up in this are children who under different circumstances would be having no trouble at all.”

Some youthful denizens of crack houses are there unwillingly, of course. Such was the case of Dooney Waters, a 7-year-old from Landover, Md., whose pleas to sleep at school rather than return to his mother’s drug-infested apartment drew a poignant mention from President Bush in a 1989 anti-drug speech.

But for many teen-agers, even those who do not use drugs, the allure is strong--the fast pace, the free-flowing money and the outlaw camaraderie of those who buy, prepare and smoke cocaine.

“For a 13-year-old, it can be very mesmerizing,” said Ed Turley, target area manager for Community Youth Gang Services, a nonprofit group that contracts with the city and county of Los Angeles. “It’s kind of like a TV movie--but living it in real life.”

The two-bedroom bungalow in the 500 block of Washington Avenue, near the eastern edge of Pomona, was a sorry excuse for a crack house. There were no metal plates in the door, iron bars on the windows, peepholes or hidden slots--the accouterments associated with such illicit fortresses.

Instead, a welcome mat by the back door showed two swans holding a basket. Inside, a cheerleading trophy stood on a bedside table next to a Virgin Mary statuette and several liquor bottles. Among the disheveled possessions were several pages pulled from a book. “Growing Up Drug Free,” the heading said. “A Parent’s Guide to Prevention.”

Shay Shay visited Kelley at the house occasionally, said Sharmaine Shelby, 32, an accountant.

Shelby said she had moved into the $550-a-month house in February with Kelley, a Little League pitcher and Nintendo devotee who--with his ponytail, gold chain and red Fila tennis shoes--was more interested in looking handsome than proving his toughness on the streets.

“I always thought I was the one who was going to die first,” said Kelley’s 17-year-old brother, Chucky Anderson, who moved into the house in April after his release from a juvenile camp in Banning. “I’m the gang-banger, not my little brother.”

In May, Sharmaine married Darryl Shelby, an auto mechanic who had been sentenced to one year in jail in 1985 for possession of cocaine and being under the influence of PCP. After the wedding, the family moved, but Kelley often returned to the house, which had been left in a cousin’s care.

Sharmaine Shelby denies that the house was ever used to sell drugs. Instead, she contends that police labeled it a crack house in order to harass Chucky, who is known on the streets as “Lil’ Blood” and is wanted for an alleged probation violation related to the 15-month term he said he recently served for joy riding in a stolen car.

Shelby does concede, however, that the house became a social headquarters for her children’s friends and that some of those who passed through could have been involved with drugs.

“Just because the people you hang around with might do something doesn’t mean you do it,” she said. “But anywhere the police see black teen-agers hanging out, they call it a damn crack house.”

Pomona detectives are unequivocal about what went on there. They said they witnessed sales from the house’s alley doorway, and sent narcotics officers there to make undercover buys. Although police were unable to say whether any drug-related arrests had been made there, the mostly Latino neighbors along the tree-lined street of older, wooden homes said they knew the score.

“It was disaster, that house,” said one neighbor, a 26-year-old construction worker who declined to give his name. “Everybody knew what was going on.”

This was not the sort of environment that Shay Shay’s family had envisioned when they left their apartment in a Compton housing project for the suburban tracts of Pomona in 1965.

Hers was one of hundreds of black families who, in the wake of the Watts riots, traded the troubles of inner-city Los Angeles for this then-sleepy citrus town 35 miles to the east.

But by the time Shay Shay was born in 1977, the city was in the throes of a devastating economic tailspin from which it is still struggling to recover. White flight left neighborhoods sapped. In time, the destructive cycles of ghetto life brought drugs and drive-by shootings.

Her mother, Sandra Tillman, tried to make the best of things for her only child. A thick photo album filled with certificates of grade-school achievement is testimony to her efforts. She managed to pay for dance lessons, both tap and ballet. Sometimes, mother and daughter passed evenings singing hymns together at home.

“She was just a normal, average girl,” said one of Shay Shay’s friends. “School and church and home.”

But it was hard to keep things normal. Tillman had to bring up her daughter alone after Shay Shay’s father, a Vietnam veteran from whom she was separated, died in a car crash two days before Christmas, 1979.

Tillman, a devout Christian who does volunteer work at her church, had problems of her own along the way. In 1989, she was sentenced to five months in jail for selling a $20 rock of cocaine to undercover narcotics officers. She served 2 1/2 months, during which friends had to come stay with Shay Shay, then 11.

It was about that age that Shay Shay began to venture into the sometimes too-fast world around her. She would walk out the door, ignoring her mother’s frantic queries. By seventh grade, she had run away several times, though usually for no longer than a day or two. She became involved with boy friends twice her age.

“I often told her to stay out of other people’s houses; you don’t know what might happen,” said Tillman, 40, who had hoped to take Shay Shay away from Pomona. But the terms of her probation dictate that she stay in the county until the end of 1992. “I told her, at least learn to seek out a family-style home.”

Her funeral, on July 8, drew nearly 200 people to the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, a boxy, unadorned structure where folding chairs had to be set up to make room for the overflow crowd.

Shay Shay’s open coffin, pink with a floral design, was wheeled to the pulpit. Her body was clothed in a shimmery white gown with a feathery scoop neckline. Her mother, looking dazed and overwhelmed, needed two people to help her down the aisle and into a seat.

“This is a strange land!” said Shay Shay’s pastor, James E. Berry. “It’s a land where the Golden Rule has been replaced by the rule of gold . . . where the brother’s dope has took more folk than the Klansman’s rope.”

Then Berry turned to the congregants and implored them to look within. If they were to die tomorrow, he asked, what could be said of their lives?

“Shay Shay would want you to be saved,” he said. “Stand up! . . . (God is) waiting for you, oh yes he is.”

Among the first to accept his offer of salvation was Kelley’s mother, Sharmaine Shelby, who had buried her own son three days earlier. Slowly, she rose from a wooden pew, her right arm outstretched, eyes puffy and tears streaming down her cheeks.