2 Boys Killed by Suspected Gang Members : Street violence: Friends, teachers say both tried to avoid gang influence but found it was a struggle.

Two young boys, both of whom struggled to distance themselves from the gang influences around them, were fatally shot in separate incidents that stemmed from disputes with older suspected gang members, authorities said Tuesday.

One of the boys, 12-year-old Ricardo Escobar, died Monday after he was shot in the head with an assault rifle while riding his bike near the La Puente apartment complex where he lived with his mother and five younger siblings.

The suspects pulled up in a light-colored truck shortly after 8 p.m. and exchanged gang slogans with the boy, who authorities said had gang affiliations. Friends and neighbors, however, said the youth merely “hung around with the wrong crowd,” according to apartment manager Manuel Torres.

The other boy, 13-year-old Marco Velazquez, was shot to death as he fled from several young men after a confrontation outside a grocery store in the City Terrace area of East Los Angeles, sheriff’s deputies said.

Although friends and teachers said Marco sometimes hung around with gang members, his family described him as a “momma’s boy”--the youngest of six children--who volunteered to paint over graffiti and took pains to avoid gang-style dress.

There have been no arrests in either case.

“There are so many gangbangers in this neighborhood that it’s hard to have friends who are not associated with gangs,” said Joni Brill, Marco’s teacher last year at Belvedere Junior High School. “But Marco was a wonderful young man. He would have gotten out of the neighborhood and done something.”

According to neighbors around Duran’s Grocery and Bakery in City Terrace, several of the young cholos who regularly hang out in front of the store spotted Marco about 5:30 p.m. Monday and began to argue with him.

Jose Duran, an ex-boxer who has owned the market for the last seven years, said he usually asks the gang members to leave or hoses down the sidewalk to shoo them away from the store. But he was not at work that day and the man behind the counter thought the teen-agers were just fooling around outside.

Marco, who played soccer, pitched for a Little League team and ran cross-country, tried to get away by sprinting east on Pomeroy Street. Three of the young men, between the ages of 17 and 20, gave chase and one fired several shots, deputies said. Marco was pronounced dead at County-USC Medical Center with a single gunshot to the back.

“His friends used to tease him because he only wanted to be with his family,” said Marco’s sister, Nestora Hoyos, 26, as she sat on the front porch of their weathered wood-frame house. She said Marco’s mother, who is on disability from her job providing home-care for infirm senior citizens, had gone to try to view the body.

“There was nothing bad about him,” said her husband, Jorge Hoyos. “He was a good kid--friendly, obedient, studious.”

In La Puente, relatives of 12-year-old Ricardo Escobar could not be reached for comment Tuesday, but friends described him as “the man of the family” who often baby-sat his younger brothers and sisters, said Ignacio Perez Jr., 15, a friend of the slain boy.

Magdalena Lopez, Ricardo’s fifth-grade teacher, tearfully recalled how the boy would confide that he wanted to escape the influences of his Laura Avenue neighborhood, where neighbors said drug deals and gunshots are daily facts of life.

He enjoyed swimming in the apartment complex pool, playing catch with a football and joking with neighbors.

“This was a boy who had a future,” she said. “I’m not talking college or medical school, but he could see himself as an adult. He could think of high school.”