Baby Injured in Attack by Gang Member Dies : Violence: Family members try to make sense of her death. Police seek driver of car that struck the man holding her.

A 5-month-old girl died Thursday of injuries suffered when a gang member deliberately drove his car into a family friend who was holding her.

As Lashanique Leverett was pronounced dead of massive brain injuries at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, Los Angeles police were searching for the driver of the two-door Chevrolet Caprice who caused the baby’s death.

“How could someone hit a 5-month-old child?” asked the baby’s grandmother, Marian Dorsey, trying in vain to make sense of what had happened. “I don’t know what is going on with the human race. We’re going to end up self-destructing.”

The baby was in a car Wednesday morning with her mother, Lashawnda Robertson, 17; her father, Sylvester Leverett, 19, and Howard Germany, 20, the car’s owner.

Germany, holding the baby, stepped out of the car and a man driving the Caprice accelerated from across the street and swerved to strike him. The baby fell on her head.

Rushed to the hospital, the child was placed on life-support systems, her parents keeping a vigil by her side. Germany was treated for leg injuries and released.

Police said that Germany was associated with a gang and that the driver of the car belongs to a rival gang.

About 30 officers were canvassing the West 78th Street area where the attack took place, looking for the car and its driver. “It’s a high priority item for us,” a homicide detective said.

To the baby’s family, it was as though a light had gone out.

“She was like a little toy,” Dorsey said at the small West 27th Street apartment where her son, the child’s mother and the baby lived with her and her daughter, Tenisha Carmenar, 16.

On one wall was a friend’s drawing of the baby, and there was a photo of her in the center of a large reproduction of a dollar bill labeled “Million Dollar Baby.” A white bunny toy lay on the sofa next to a tiny pair of sneakers that the family had bought her. Lashanique had gotten to wear them once.

The parents were engaged, together since seventh grade, Dorsey said. The pair, who had dropped out of high school, were not home, and Dorsey did not know where they had gone in their grief. Lashanique was their only child.

The parents agreed to donate their baby’s organs “to save other children,” Dorsey said as she turned on a video. In it, Dorsey sang a song while the baby laughed in delight in her father’s arms.

“I lost my father in 1981 because of gangs,” Dorsey said, her voice breaking. “I’m tired of gang-banging. They took my father, now my granddaughter, too.”

A month ago, after Dorsey had gone to the cemetery to lay flowers on her father’s grave, she said, “I had a dream. My father came to me and he was pulling at me, and pulling the baby away. I was saying, no, no. I knew death was calling one of us.”