Diligence Pays Off as Officers Arrest Suspect in Boy’s Death : Crime: Painstaking research leads sheriff’s deputies to a 15-year-old who they think fired a random shot half a mile away from where 5-year-old Adrian Benitez was killed.

The task looming before sheriff’s investigators was worse than searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

Somewhere in a two-mile radius including portions of Carson and Wilmington, someone had fired a gun into the air, a common event.

Usually, such airborne bullets rocket silently back to earth and strike unnoticed--on lawns, trees, streets, driveways.

This time, however, the bullet plunged into the head of 5-year-old Adrian Benitez as he walked down a quiet Carson street with his mother.

Homicide investigators, who were put on the case immediately even though Adrian managed to hang on to his life for six agonizing days, had to pinpoint from where in that two-mile expanse the bullet had been fired before they could begin figuring out who had fired it.

On March 21, 10 days after Adrian was shot and four days after he died, sheriff’s deputies made the arrest they thought they never could.

Deputy Bob Tauson admitted that he wasn’t confident that he and his partner, Deputy Bill Neumann, could do it.

“A lot of people are calling in and we’re checking out all the ‘shots fired’ reports at the Carson (sheriff’s) station and the LAPD, but the leads are just really, really thin,” Tauson said less than a day after the boy was hurt.

Their suspect, a 15-year-old boy now being held at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey, on Wednesday pleaded not guilty in Long Beach Juvenile Court to one count of murder and one count of illegally discharging a firearm. He is scheduled to appear April 1 for a detention hearing, when a judge will decide whether he can go home to his parents pending trial.

The investigation leading to the boy’s arrest was a painstaking one, conducted largely by telephone, Tauson said.

“We got about 30 or 40 calls from people saying they’d heard something that night,” Tauson said. “We checked out each of them, but then we realized we were starting to get more calls from the area south of where he was shot.”

Roughly one-third of the calls centered on a Wilmington neighborhood half a mile south of Island Avenue and Lomita Boulevard in Carson, where the bullet struck Adrian.

Some of the callers said they had heard shots that night and then were told later by their children that a boy had fired off several rounds from a handgun to show off, Tauson said.

“Finally we got a call from an adult who said he saw the boy with the gun . . . and from there we were able to identify the boy,” Tauson said.

Investigators went to the boy’s home, about a mile west of the neighborhood where he had allegedly fired the shots. Family members turned over a .38-caliber handgun they had borrowed from a friend several months before to help protect their home.

“The family had concealed it in their house, but apparently this young 15-year-old knew where it was and he took it without the family knowing” on the day Adrian was shot, Tauson said. “We figure he’d only had it an hour or two.”

Ballistics tests confirmed that the bullet that killed Adrian had been fired from that gun, Tauson said.

“He just walked up to where some friends of his were . . . near the corner of Sandison and Lagoon Avenue, and he just shot it in the air a few times to impress them,” Tauson said.

Half a mile away, across Lomita Boulevard, one of those random bullets came down and broke a young father’s heart.

“I lost 5 1/2 years, the years that I worked for my son, thinking of my son,” said Francisco Benitez, 27, a parking lot attendant who said he has worked at several jobs in recent years to support his family. “When I was tired and I wanted to stop, I’d think of my little boy and I’d keep working.

“I’m happy they caught the guy . . . because maybe next time he does it, it’s your wife or your son” who gets hurt, Benitez said. “He’s in jail now, and I’m happy. But it doesn’t wake up my son. It doesn’t bring him back.”