Woodland Hills Man Slain Trying to Stop Thieves : Crime: The victim was chasing three people leaving a store with stolen beer. Friends and relatives said his effort to help was typical of him.

A 24-year-old Woodland Hills man who wanted to become a police officer was shot to death as he chased three suspected gang members fleeing from an Encino store with stolen beer, Los Angeles police said Monday.

Friends and relatives said the action that led to his death was typical of Christopher L. Brown, a former security guard, who they said felt obliged to protect those in trouble.

“That was Chris,” Brown’s father, Dennis, said Monday. “I wasn’t surprised. I just wish it hadn’t been fatal.”

Brown was eating a hot dog with two longtime friends and soccer teammates in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven in the 17000 block of Burbank Boulevard late Sunday when they noticed two young men and a woman run from the market carrying two or three 12-packs of beer, Detective Rick Swanston said.

Seeing the store clerk pointing at the fleeing trio and yelling for help, the three friends gave chase until Brown cornered one of the thieves in a yard in the same block near White Oak Avenue.

Brown was shot in the chest with a pistol and pronounced dead at Northridge Hospital Medical Center.

“We tried to do something right and do something good for someone and it just like backfired in our faces,” one of Brown’s companions said Monday, crying. “It’s just such a tough-luck deal, man, that someone so good had to go for . . beer.”

Detectives think that the thieves, believed to be 16 to 20 years old, may be gang members because of witnesses’ descriptions of their slicked-back hair, baggy pants and dark jackets, Swanston said, and were combing police files Monday in an effort to identify them.

Swanston also noted that because the group did not threaten the 7-Eleven clerk but merely grabbed merchandise off store shelves, the beer theft alone would have been only shoplifting, a misdemeanor.

One of Brown’s friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, and Brown’s father said it was typical of him to play the role of rescuer.

Dennis Brown recalled how his oldest son had saved a puppy from abusive owners and once beat up a teen-age boy who persisted in bothering Brown’s younger sister.

“He was just always for the underdog and the displaced and sticking up for the weaker.

“I often told him, ‘Chris, one of these days you’re going to meet somebody who’s got a 2-by-4.’ And he’d always laugh and give me a hug and said, ‘But Dad, I’m a big strong tree.’ He never thought anyone would use a gun on him.”

Christopher Brown, not a big man, was well under 6 feet tall, a former supervisor said.

Brown graduated from Taft High School in Woodland Hills, studied business and marketing at Chaminade University of Honolulu and hoped to join either the Los Angeles Police Department or the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, his father said. An avid soccer player in excellent physical condition, he was also an organ donor, his father said.

Daniel Alexander, Brown’s former supervisor at Westridge Security Services of Canoga Park, where Brown worked as a guard from September to December, recalled the dark-haired, blue-eyed Brown as an able employee who was quickly promoted.

“He was a smart man, had his stuff together,” Alexander said.

Brown was assigned to patrol a gated community in the west San Fernando Valley and was soon promoted to a supervisor in charge of four other guards there, said Alexander and Gerald F. Keyes, Westridge’s vice president of operations.

“He had mentioned this would give him some experience if he could become a police officer,” Keyes said.

But as a residential guard whose chief function was to screen visitors, Brown was largely insulated from the kind of common street confrontations that lead to violence, Alexander said.

“He wasn’t really involved in making arrests; he was involved in controlling access,” Alexander said.

On Sunday, as they munched 7-Eleven hot dogs and savored a victory for their semi-professional soccer team, Brown and his teammates didn’t hesitate to follow the thieves once they realized that they had witnessed a crime, police and Brown’s friend said.

They split up, each following one of the fleeing trio. Brown jumped over a wall in his pursuit into the back yard of a single-family home. One of his friends had caught up with the woman in the group and had just grabbed her arm when a shot rang out and “froze everybody,” his friend recalled.

“It was a pop, like a cap bursting. The hardest part to deal with is that I couldn’t do anything to help him,” he said.

After finding Brown wounded, his companions flagged down a California Highway Patrol officer who was driving through a nearby gas station. It took some persuading to convince the officer that they were really in trouble, Brown’s friend said, but she finally followed them back to Brown and summoned an ambulance.

The shoplifters, meanwhile, escaped, Swanston said.