Death of an Innocent : Gangs: Denise Silva, 3, was killed in a hail of bullets. Hospital staffers who tried to save her are shaken by the continuing violence.

The nurses were crying silently, their grief evident only in the tears that streamed down their cheeks. They stripped away the blood-soaked sheets on the examining table, and slipped on fresh white ones. They briskly tucked heart monitors, intravenous apparatus and other life-saving equipment back into storage corners.

And they wept. Tousle-haired, lifeless little Denise Silva lay on the table before them, and the nurses tried, somehow, to whisk away signs of the carnage that claimed her.

Three-year-old Denise was killed Friday night while walking hand in hand with her father to the corner market. Two men had opened fire, spraying bullets wildly across 1st Street in Boyle Heights.

One bullet hit Ignacio Gomez, 33, in the foot. Another tore under Denise’s armpit on a path straight through her chest. Her father, Enrique Silva, holding another daughter, 1-year-old Stephanie, in his arms, tried to duck and pull Denise to the ground at the first staccato burst.

White Memorial Hospital’s location in Boyle Heights, in a neighborhood claimed as turf by rival gangs, has given its emergency room crew a lot of practice with gunshot wounds. The emergency department itself was shot up last October. Doctors and nurses pride themselves on a cool and detached professionalism.

But the message that came over the two-way ambulance radio at 9:15 Friday night, the one that preceded Denise’s arrival by rescue van, was the one they dreaded most: Traumatic injury. Young child. Gunshot wound to the chest.

All conversation stopped. Nurses and technicians hurried to assemble the equipment for a race against death. Two emergency room doctors ran to meet the ambulance. A surgeon was paged.

Denise’s small frame took up barely a third of the gurney. Her hand dangled limply over one side.

In minutes, she was linked to intravenous lines, pumps, tubes--tools carrying whatever hope there was of restoring her life. A surgeon stitched up the bullet hole in her heart. A nurse held plastic bags of blood over her head so gravity could speed its journey into Denise’s veins. An emergency doctor manually pumped her heart.

The medical team worked in intense concert, communicating in terse emotionless phrases. After half an hour of futile effort, Dr. Brian Johnston slipped out of the cubicle to find Denise’s father.

Enrique Silva was hunched against a wall in the far corner of the emergency room, his clothes and white sneakers soaked with his daughter’s blood. Outside in a car, his wife waited with their 2-day-old son.

“The bullet went through her heart,” Johnston, 52, told Silva. “It is very serious. We are doing everything we can to save your daughter, but I have to tell you I am very worried about her.”

“She is going to make it?” Silva asked, seeming not to have heard what Johnston was trying to say.

“I’m afraid she isn’t,” the doctor replied, gripping the sobbing father’s shoulder.

The time was duly noted, according to the medical protocol for such events: Death was pronounced at 9:56 p.m., April 10, 1992. One of the staff walked quietly to a phone to call the coroner’s office, an obligation in cases of violent death.

Johnston again sought out Silva. The 33-year-old father was waiting in an office where staff had led him for privacy. Johnston took a chair opposite Silva, their knees almost touching in the cramped space.

A few minutes later, the doctor emerged. “You never get used to this,” Johnston said, his eyes red-rimmed.

An unnatural quiet descended on the emergency room that would persist the rest of the night. Police began filing in. A clerk called Father Gregory Boyle from nearby Mission Dolores--someone whom the staff at White Memorial has come to depend on at such times.

Officers waited quietly for a chance to interview Silva. Two workers from the coroner’s office arrived to take custody of the body. A detective followed them out. In his hand was a plastic bag whose contents will be displayed in a courtroom someday, should Denise Silva’s murderers ever come to justice:

A blood-soaked print blouse, flowered pants and a tiny pair of patent leather party shoes.

Denise was the second child killed by gangs last week in Los Angeles, police said.

Two days before Denise’s death, Sabrina Haley, 18 months old, was fatally wounded while riding with her father in his car in South Los Angeles. According to police, the father, Michael Haley, 19, had associated with gang members and was the intended target.

In the crowded Boyle Heights barrio that is home to three generations of the Silva family, gangs and the risk of gunfire are a part of everyday life.

On Saturday morning, grieving relatives and saddened neighbors gathered in front of three houses where the Silva family members live. Gloria Lujan, 23, who lives around the corner, coolly pointed out three spots within 100 feet of her where shootings left two men dead and a third paralyzed in the past two years.

Nearby, a trail of blood led to the front door of Denise’s grandparents’ home, staining the asphalt along the route where Enrique Silva, clutching both his girls, had rushed in a panic to seek assistance.

In those desperate moments, bystanders had swarmed to the house to help. One boy went to pound on the door of the pentacostal Templo Siloe, where his mother, a nurse, was attending services. But there was little the nurse could do.

Among family members and neighbors, Denise’s death seemed to provoke a new level of outrage. “Not even kids are safe around here anymore,” Lujan said.

At the Hollenbeck Police Station on 1st Street, detectives who worked all night and into the afternoon said an unprecedented number of phone calls--nine--came in from people with information about the shooting.

“Their exact words are: ‘Enough is enough,’ ” said Detective Sal Nares.