10-Year-Old Boy Arrested in Killing : Crime: Slaying of a young Barrio Logan mother may have stemmed from refusal to lend a motor scooter to the boy and his friends, her husband says.

A 10-year-old boy was arrested Wednesday in connection with the death of a young mother of three who was killed as a bullet pierced the wall of the trailer where she lived, striking her in the back of the head as she put her son to bed.

And the husband of the dead woman said Wednesday evening that he thinks the shooting might have stemmed from his refusal to lend his motor scooter to the boy and his friends.

“I can’t explain it . . . but I don’t think it was an accident,” Fidel Mariscal said. “Possibly they were trying to scare me . . . possibly they were trying to hurt me. I think it was intentional.”

Manuela Garcia de la Rosa, 25, was killed Sunday night after pulling the shoes off her son, who was 8 years old, just two years younger than the neighborhood boy suspected of killing her.

The boy was arrested on suspicion of shooting a firearm in city limits and shooting at an inhabited building. Police are looking into the possibility of homicide charges. In addition, police detained but did not arrest two companions, ages 13 and 14. Police said the youths took turns firing a .22-caliber rifle from a neighbor’s rooftop, but the youngest boy is believed to have fired the shot that killed Garcia.

Detectives said they still are trying to determine if the shot was directed at the trailer or was fired randomly.

“It’s possible this was an indiscriminate shooting,” said San Diego police Lt. John Welter. “If it was, it’s not only sad, it’s sick.”

Police said they found the boys by using a laser beam to trace the trajectory of the bullet from the hole in the trailer wall. The beam led to the roof of a one-story house in the alley behind Garcia’s trailer. By questioning neighbors about who had access to the rooftop, Welter said, police were able to locate one of the boys.

All three youths live within two blocks of Garcia’s trailer, Welter said. The 14-year-old had been under house arrest for a prior conviction, Welter said, but no details of the conviction were released. Police are looking for a fourth youth who might have the gun.

Although police said it was not clear whether the youths knew Garcia or her family, Mariscal, 32, said he had been involved in several minor run-ins with the boys.

Mariscal said the 10-year-old had once borrowed his Yamaha motor scooter and might have been angry because Mariscal balked at lending it again.

Demands to borrow the scooter began a few days after Mariscal moved to the neighborhood last month and were repeated during he five weeks before the shooting. On one occasion, the youngest boy tried to ride off on the scooter when Mariscal was at work, he said.

“I think my mother or my wife, I’m not sure which, told him not to do that,” Mariscal said. “But they didn’t touch him. They didn’t offend him. We didn’t offend him in any way.”

Mariscal had not discussed the arrests with police Wednesday, because he had been occupied with arrangements for his wife’s burial in Mexico. He said he still is struggling to comprehend his wife’s death.

Garcia’s death was the latest sign to residents of Barrio Logan that the crime-ridden neighborhood is deteriorating.

“People are shooting up the barrio so often now, its surprising there haven’t been more innocent victims,” said a neighbor, Al Ducheny, who is chairman of the Harborview Community Council, an area advocacy group. “There is no longer a fear of retribution for crimes committed in our community. Anything goes in Barrio Logan.”

The death saddened many but fazed few in a neighborhood that has grown accustomed to the sounds of gunshots. But, as newcomers to the barrio, Garcia and Mariscal always worried.

The young couple had been forced to move from Southeast San Diego last month after the house they were renting underwent renovation. Somehow, it seemed, the only area they could afford was Barrio Logan.

They looked for a house that would accommodate their two sons and daughter, and the families of two of Mariscal’s siblings. The 14-member extended family chose a place on Newton Avenue near Evans Street, a ramshackle, two-bedroom house across the street from a metal plating shop and up the block from a shipyard. They heard that the area had problems with crime, but it was cheap.

Mariscal’s parents, who are visiting from Guadalajara, stayed in the house. The three other families lived in separate trailers in a cramped back yard.

In forming their small family compound, they thought they could insulate themselves from the dangers of the street, Mariscal said.

“As long as they didn’t mix with the neighborhood, they thought they were going to be OK,” said Mariscal’s aunt, Teresa Avalos.

But, at 9 p.m. Sunday, the streets came calling.

Missing the window by 6 inches, a bullet crashed through the west wall of Garcia’s trailer. One moment, Garcia was undoing the laces on Fidel Jr.’s high-top sneakers. The next, she lay on the floor, her head surrounded by a growing pool of blood. Having no explanation for Garcia’s collapse, her husband thought she had fainted at the sound of gunfire outside.

“We thought at first she hit her head on the edge,” Mariscal said, pointing to the corner of a dresser. “But no one bleeds like that from a bump.” Not until doctors at UCSD Medical Center pronounced her dead shortly after, did Garcia’s family realize she had been shot.

“I couldn’t understand what people were talking about when they said anyone can be murdered in this neighborhood,” said Mariscal, a cabinet and door maker who emigrated four years ago from a small barrio in Guadalajara, Mexico. “I saw my wife killed, and now I understand.”

As Mariscal spoke, his three children--a 6-year-old girl, Gabriela, and 3-year-old boy, Pable, in addition to 8-year-old Fidel Jr.--ran in and out of the house, the impact of their mother’s death still not clear to them.

The two eldest children realize their mother is dead, Mariscal said, but they have trouble accepting.

“I told them she is in heaven,” Mariscal said. “They saw her when she was here on the floor bleeding. They saw that they took her to the hospital. They are only partly resigned to it, like me.”

Mariscal talked with quiet disbelief about the absurdity of the incident and the savagery of a society where it could take place.

“This has happened to many families besides mine,” Mariscal said. “Crime is getting bad everywhere. It’s because the father and mother don’t teach noble sentiments to their children. They don’t teach them love for others. I blame the parents.”

Along Newton Avenue, voices joined Mariscal’s to register contempt for the area’s lawlessness.

“This crime is especially heart-wrenching for San Diego,” said Vincent Hall, spokesman for Councilman Bob Filner who represents Barrio Logan. “The seemingly random violence demonstrates the abhorrent situation in our neighborhoods. The problem has been the lack of commitment on the part of the City Council as a whole to make public safety an issue for the city. It hurts more, that the victim is a mother of small children. . . . In this case, people have a right to be outraged.”

Others, although hardened by experience, were troubled by the senselessness of the killing.

“When you hear about shootings in the barrio, you know whoever did it really wanted to kill,” Elizabeth Contreras, a 16-year-old junior at San Diego High School, said as she crossed Newton Avenue on her way home from school. “Those happen. They aren’t so surprising. But, in this shooting, a lady got it in the back while she’s in her house, putting her son to sleep--well that makes no sense. You wonder what makes people do that?”

Thomas Rooseveldt, who has survived barrio life for 20 years--much of that spent on the street--said random gunfire often rouses him from already fitful sleep.

“At night, I hear shots and don’t have any idea who’s doing it,” said Rooseveldt, 52. “That’s bad, when it’s dark and you don’t know where it’s coming from.”

Filner’s office and barrio activists have called for more police patrols, particularly walking beats, in the barrio and surrounding high-crime areas.

“The law enforcement system is inadequate,” Hall said. “And it’s a myth that this type of crime happens only in Barrio Logan. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere else in the city.”