‘Paint Ball’ Attack Injures Woman

In the latest of a series of attacks in the western San Fernando Valley, a Canoga Park woman was shot in the face with a “paint ball” gun of the type designed for mock combat games and may lose her sight in one eye, Los Angeles police said Thursday.

Youths, who apparently think of the attacks as pranks, shot Irma Aparicio, 23, in the right eye about 4 p.m. Wednesday as she waited at a bus stop in Woodland Hills, police said.

Aparicio was treated at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Woodland Hills for a “critical injury” to her eye and then transferred to County-USC Medical Center where she was treated by eye specialists, a county hospital spokesman said.

Neither hospital would say if her vision was permanently impaired, but Detective Rick Swanston said pellet fragments were embedded in her eye.

“It’s not clear if the damage is permanent,” Swanston said.

“We’ve been seeing a couple of these attacks a week” for the past three months, Swanston said. “It’s the new thing with these kids.”

The guns use compressed air to fire hollow, marble-sized plastic containers of brightly colored paint that burst on impact. They are used in increasingly popular combat-type games, usually between teams of contestants who wear extensive protective clothing and goggles.

Several hours earlier Wednesday, a pedestrian was shot in the back with a paint ball about a mile away in the 21000 block of Sherman Way near De Soto Avenue, Swanston said. The victim was not injured. Witnesses told police the ball was fired from a white car.

“Right now, we think they’re unrelated” attacks, Swanston said.

Aparicio, a housekeeper on her way home from work, was seated at a bus stop at Topanga Canyon and Ventura boulevards when a blue car carrying two youths who appeared to be teen-agers pulled up and one of them leaned out and shot her from less than 10 feet away, Swanston said.

“She didn’t even see what hit her. All she knew was that she was hit in the eye with something and down she went,” Swanston said. “A witness, also at the bus stop, said they didn’t say anything. They just drove up, blasted her and drove off.”

Police in eight other Los Angeles police divisions said they had experienced few such assaults outside the West Valley.

But Lt. Joe Garcia, who compiles crime statistics for the department’s Valley Bureau, said there were no separate statistics on paint ball attacks, which are lumped together with other attacks “as an assault with a deadly weapon.”

Most people arrested for paint ball attacks are usually teen-agers “just trying to splatter people for fun,” Swanston said.

“They go after bicyclists and pedestrians, sometimes people in other cars,” he said. “I don’t think they realize they can cause serious damage.”

Swanston said he has made several arrests for the offense in the past year but could not say how many.