Guns, Violence Exact a Toll on L.A.’s Youngest Victims : Trauma: Thousands of youngsters are being left with psychological scars from a daily siege of shootings.

In the Aliso-Pico housing project near downtown Los Angeles, 11-year-old Frankie Mugia and his sister Crystal, 6, have had to sleep on the floor of their second-story bedroom to avoid bullets. Their window has been shot out by gunfire.

How often do you hear gunshots?

“Every day,” Frankie says.

How often do you see guns?

“Every day.”

If children are the future, then firearms are altering the future of Los Angeles County.

Twenty years ago, coroner’s records show, one in 10 fatal shootings involved children or teen-agers as victims. Today, the ratio is more than one in four.

Five years ago, the district attorney’s office prosecuted 945 youths for carrying firearms. By last year, the number had more than doubled.

And the Los Angeles Times Poll recently found that one in five households with children in Los Angeles County has been victimized by gun-related crime during the last two years.

Today, triggermen in gang shootings often are not yet old enough to shave. Some schools have had to do away with book lockers because students use them to stash pistols and other contraband. Inner-city children who cannot tell one bird’s song from another can often distinguish the caliber and proximity of a gun by the crack its report.

Doctors believe there may be tens of thousands of children in Los Angeles County whose psychiatric health and emotional growth are being disrupted by constant exposure to violence, especially gunfire.

“Look at the level of meanness and cruelty that these children are experiencing out there--and yet we expect them to grow up and be Jack and Jill,” said Dr. Range Hutson, director of emergency admitting at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

“We are creating a generation of people who just don’t care about what it is they do to each other.”

Some contend that tightening control of gun and ammunition sales is the answer.

Others argue that more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens would help deter criminals, thus making the streets safer for both children and adults. According to the Times Poll, 9% of firearms owners in Southern California say they have used their guns to thwart burglaries, car thefts or other crimes. Many blame leniency in the courts and a decline in family discipline for the proliferation of gun-related violence. Today’s juvenile delinquent with a gun, they say, is tomorrow’s armed robber or killer.

Still others contend that the carnage can only increase as long as residents of the county’s most upscale and influential areas, where shootings are a relative rarity, remain apathetic.

“Nobody (cares) so long as it stops in the barrio and the ghetto,” said Deputy Probation Officer James J. Galipeau. “Until the white middle class sees the real threat is to them and their children, nothing’s going to get done.”

The toll among children, meanwhile, continues to mount.

A review of medical records published in 1988 by doctors at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, which receives a high portion of medical emergencies in central Los Angeles, found that the number of children admitted to the center with gunshot wounds began to grow dramatically in 1980.

Between 1974 and 1980, no child under the age of 10 was hospitalized there for gunshot wounds, the study found. By 1987, however, doctors at the center had treated and admitted at least 34 children for gunshot wounds, all 9 or younger.

Ten had been shot unintentionally by other children or had accidentally shot themselves; 11 were hit by stray bullets fired by gang members or in retaliation for gang-related activities of their older siblings; 10 were inadvertently shot with guns that were aimed at other relatives during family disputes; two were shot during robberies, and one was hit by sniper fire.

Three of the 34 children died of their wounds; three others suffered brain damage requiring them to be institutionalized; one suffers from recurrent bowel obstructions; two underwent colostomies; one lost an eye; two lost parts of a hand, and another suffers from radical nerve damage to the wrist.

“Childhood gunshot wounds,” the study concluded, “have become a major urban medical problem.”

If anything, the situation in Los Angeles has worsened in recent years.

In the 1970-71 fiscal year, four children 9 or younger were murdered with guns in Los Angeles County, coroner’s records show. Last year, there were 10, plus two who were accidentally shot to death. Since April, gunshots have killed three children, the youngest 18 months old.

At Childrens Hospital near Hollywood, 31 children age 14 or younger were treated for gunshot wounds in 1991, compared to 21 the year before.

“Children used to be off-limits to criminals . . . and that’s no longer true,” said Dr. Nancy Schonfeld, director of emergency services at Childrens Hospital. “It’s really sick.”

One evening last July, Bianca Duran, 10, her two younger brothers and their seamstress mother, Enriqueta, were caught in a gang cross-fire while playing in San Fernando’s Las Palmas Park.

A shotgun blast raked the mother’s right arm and back as lead pellets ripped into Bianca’s stomach, head and hand. Other pellets hit Bianca’s 8- and 9-year-old brothers in their backs.

Bianca, the most seriously injured, underwent surgery and was in the hospital for three days.

“It hurt a little,” she said.

Bianca and her brothers have fully recovered from their wounds, at least physically. Sometimes when she sleeps, according to her mother, Bianca whimpers, thrashes violently, then awakes with a start--as if she is reliving the shooting in the park.

“Before this happened,” Duran said, “the city was so beautiful. But now. . . .” Her words trailed into tears.

In February, another little girl, Cristal Anguiano, 12, was caught in a gang gunfight as she ran to buy ice cream from a passing truck outside her home in South Los Angeles. She was shot in the heart but managed to carry her 2-year-old brother, Rafael, to safety.

Beyond the number of children killed and wounded, there is an additional toll taken on inner-city youngsters who are regularly exposed to the sound and sight of gunfire.

Many psychiatrists, counselors and others contend there may be tens of thousands of children who are suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), like that experienced by some combat veterans.

Five years ago, a study by the National Institute of Mental Health estimated that 1% of American adults had post-traumatic stress as a result of exposure to shootings or other violent episodes. Victims typically complained of nightmares, a feeling of “jumpiness” and trouble sleeping.

Children exposed to shooting incidents, according to a report by Los Angeles psychiatrists Spencer Eth and Robert S. Pynoos, are often haunted by “the sight, sound and smell of gunfire, the screams or sudden silence of the victim, the splash of blood and tissue on the child’s clothes, the grasp of a dying parent and the eventual police sirens.”

Sixth-grader Curly James Jr., who lives in a South-Central Los Angeles housing project, came home from school one day last year and was watching cartoons when he looked out his living room window and witnessed the fatal shooting of a gang member.

The 11-year-old boy can describe in vivid detail how the gunman fired over the heads of several toddlers playing on the lawn, how the victim grimaced in pain as he fell to the ground, clutching the grass with both hands.

That night, after he had finally fallen asleep, Curly awoke to screaming from across the courtyard, looked out his bedroom window and saw an apartment engulfed in flames. Gang members had thrown a Molotov cocktail into the apartment in retaliation for the shooting, killing a pregnant woman and her 1-year-old child.

The boy helped police identify the man later convicted of the shooting--and the youngster sometimes has nightmares. “Every time I go to school,” he said, “I see his face.”

A survey headed by UCLA resident psychiatrist Eugene Jennings found last year that of 40 randomly selected high school students in Compton and South-Central Los Angeles, seven met the criteria for being diagnosed as suffering post-traumatic stress disorder. None had received counseling.

Several others who had witnessed violent acts and were found not to have the disorder complained of upsetting memories and mental images that sometimes affected their moods and ability to study.

“If the sample is representative,” Jennings said, “we have a problem on our hands.”

Many apparent symptoms fade with time and without counseling, mental health experts say. But if the disorder is not immediately treated, a child’s ability to concentrate and learn can be disrupted, causing the child to lag in educational development while peers advance.

Left untreated, a child can also grow up less able to handle the stresses of day-to-day life, according to psychiatrist Andrew Wang of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“It’s a cumulative effect,” Wang said. “The risk increases each time (the child) has a stress. Humans have a threshold when it comes to stress and when you reach a certain point, you explode.”

The incidence of untreated PTSD, experts said, may be much higher in Los Angeles’ burgeoning immigrant communities, where many children from war-ravaged countries have already been exposed to gunfire, and where language differences and tight budgets can deter parents from seeking counseling for their children.

“A lot of these parents simply don’t have the resources to protect their kids like middle-class families do,” said USC psychiatrist William Arroyo, who has counseled or helped screen about 400 children traumatized by firearms-related incidents in Los Angeles County.

“You have many families,” Arroyo said, “that are minimizing the suffering of their children by adopting an attitude that says, ‘Don’t talk about it and maybe it’ll go away.’ ”

In the past, counselors and psychologists employed by the 630,000-student school district were often able to intervene when children were traumatized by violence. But with shootings on the rise and cutbacks in funding, the district has not kept pace, Arroyo and others said.

The ratio of students to counselors in the district’s junior and senior high schools has doubled in the last three years, to about 700 students for every counselor, records show. The district has 375 school-based psychologists, but fewer than 50 are available to counsel students who have survived or witnessed shooting incidents, said Loeb Aronin, the school district’s director of psychological services.

“We are losing ground,” Aronin said.

School district officials, meanwhile, have seen a dramatic increase within the last five years in the number of guns and other weapons students have brought on campus out of fear.

During the 1986-87 school year, records show, 330 students were recommended for expulsion after being caught with weapons. Last year, there were 519 such recommendations, the majority involving sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.

“We’ve got kids now who think it’s not only appropriate to bring firearms to campus, but necessary,” said Marleen Wong, a licensed clinical social worker for the school district. “Even their families often feel it necessary for their kids to carry guns. That is their reality--that they are having to go through a combat zone every day.”

At Hollenbeck Junior High School, officials did away with student locker privileges to limit hiding places for weapons and other contraband. Records show that as many guns were taken from students in the last half of 1991 as in the preceding four years.

At nearby Belvedere Junior High School, bullets were fired at four students or more in the last two years. One was shot to death last year while walking home from his first day in the eighth grade.

“When one kid tells another one today, ‘I’m gonna kill you,’ ” said Principal Victoria M. Castro, “they take it seriously.”

At the Northeast Juvenile Justice Center near downtown Los Angeles, authorities see first hand the result of childrens’ threats these days.

“The weapons available to kids in Los Angeles today are tenfold what they were 10 years ago, weapons that are unimaginable to the public,” said Superior Court Judge Sherman W. Smith Jr., who recently transferred to another courthouse.

The juvenile center has a backlog of 29 homicide cases--each one involving a firearm.

In one pending case, two 15-year-old Boyle Heights gang members are accused of beating up another 15-year-old boy in April. One of the gang members allegedly held the boy in a headlock, turning him toward the other gang member, who allegedly shot the victim with a .25-caliber pistol. In another case, this one involving a .38-caliber pistol, three youths are accused of having waited for two nights last April outside a home in Culver City, then ambushing a 56-year-old man and killing him for his car.

“They didn’t even mince words,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Allan Walsh. “They just shot him.”

Many of the teen-age gang members prosecuted at the Northeast Juvenile Center are later supervised by Deputy Probation Officer Mary Ridgeway. She estimates that 80% have been wounded by gunfire at least once in their young lives and that perhaps 20% of the total have been shot more than once.

“It’s not just the type of firepower and the easy access to guns that’s changed,” Ridgeway said. “It’s the fact that the age of the shooters has dropped. A lot of them are 13- and 14-year-olds these days, and these kids don’t care who they hit.”

Authorities speculate that gang members are assigning shootings to younger members to avoid prosecution. Many are aware that the district attorney is increasingly prosecuting suspects in their mid- to late teens as adults. Moreover, records show, the number of juveniles charged with illegally carrying firearms has doubled in the last five years.

“When you’re 15, 16, you shoot ‘em up,” said one 18-year-old. “Now . . . the younger ones shoot. They’re easier to brainwash. They don’t know what’s happening with the law.”

Still, Ridgeway and others complain that the judiciary does not come down hard enough on juveniles who use guns. As a result, they believe, many youthful offenders graduate to gun-related violence as adults.

Under state law, prosecutors can file a “special allegation” to add two years to the sentence served by an adult felon who uses a gun to commit crime.

However, only 41% of felons sent to prison in 1988-89 for gun-related crimes in Los Angeles County saw their sentences lengthened by two years for using a firearm, according to statistics kept by the California Board of Prison Terms. The others were either never charged with use of a gun, or the allegation was dropped during plea bargaining.

In November, Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner announced that his prosecutors would no longer drop special allegations involving violent offenders and would begin pushing judges to impose maximum sentences against those accused of using firearms and other deadly weapons.

“The reason,” Reiner said, “is that the overwhelming number of armed and violent criminals are recidivists who will repeat their crimes immediately upon release from prison.”

Yet records show that criminals armed with guns continue to benefit from a local judicial system in which nearly all defendants are offered lower sentences to keep courtrooms free to try the most violent offenders.

Parolee Marcos Contreras, for example, was arrested at 2 a.m. on New Year’s Eve after Los Angeles police stopped him for driving without headlights. On the car’s floorboard, officers found a loaded .38-caliber revolver.

Contreras, 27, a former gang member who had been to prison three times on narcotics charges, told authorities he was planning to fire the gun in celebration of the new year.

Deputy Probation Officer Arvis Bruveris recommended that the judge send Contreras back to prison for the maximum time allowed--in this case, five years. “If there’s anyone who shouldn’t be near a gun, it’s (him),” Bruveris said in an interview.

Despite Bruveris’ recommendation, Contreras was sentenced to one year in the Los Angeles County Jail. With time off for good behavior, he will serve less than five months.

Contreras’ prosecutor said that regardless of the gun, “factual weaknesses” in the case prompted him in large measure to offer Contreras a plea bargain.

“It was sort of a close call,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Charles Girot said. “ . . . We have only so many prisons and you can only put so many people in them.”

There are those who suggest that if government were to impose more stringent gun-control measures, fewer guns will end up in the hands of criminals, thus making America--and Los Angeles County--a safer place.

Many others argue that the Constitution guarantees the right to “keep and bear arms.” By outlawing or severely limiting private ownership of firearms, they say, only law-abiding Americans will voluntarily surrender their guns, leaving them even more vulnerable to armed criminals. The recent riots, many believe, proved that point.

Still others contend that even if guns were outlawed, there are already so many in the United States--conservatively estimated at 200 million--and so many ways to smuggle more firearms into the country that weapons would remain available for decades.

“It’s kind of like getting the toothpaste back in the tube,” said Father Greg Boyle, a barrio priest who has been shot at repeatedly while ministering to East Los Angeles gang members.

To many in Los Angeles County, however, the debate over guns remains almost inconsequential.

Because a disproportionate number of shootings occur in working-class areas, many residents of the county’s more affluent neighborhoods consider themselves unaffected and are thus hesitant to demand change. Indeed, only 30% of Los Angeles County adults in the highest income levels say they consider their neighborhoods unsafe, compared to 60% of adults in the lowest earning brackets, the Times Poll found.

“If I were living in East Los Angeles or Watts, maybe I would’ve bought (a gun) a long time ago,” said William O. Felsman, a retired aerospace engineer, “but I don’t need it in Woodland Hills--there aren’t many thugs here.”

Gun-related violence, some authorities warn, may ultimately prove to be the great equalizer.

“It’s going to continue to spread,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block said. “And if anybody in this community--and I don’t care who they are or where they live--view it as happening to somebody else, they’re going to wake up one day and find out they were dead wrong.”

The Youngest Victims

Shooting deaths involving children used to be a rarity, but no longer. Last year, one-quarter of the 1,554 people shot to death in Los Angeles County was age 19 or younger. Since April, three children under the age of 10 have been slain:

Sabrina Haley, 18 months. Sabrina was hit by gunshots fired by reputed gang member April 8 as she sat beside her father while his car was stopped at a traffic light in South Los Angeles.

Denise Silva, 3 years old. Denise was shot through the heart April 10 during a drive-by attack as she walked hand-in-hand with her father to a corner grocery store in Boyle Heights.

Ramon Sanchez, 9 years old. Ramon was hit in the head by a stray bullet May 7 as he sat inside his family’s home in Watts, drinking a glass of milk.

Children Hit by Gunfire

A study at Martin Luther King Jr.-Drew Medical Center found that the number of children hit by gunfire in Los Angeles began to grow dramatically in 1980. Of 34 children admitted to the medical center with gunshot wounds between 1980-1987, three died and most suffered major injuries. They include:

Age/Sex Area of Shooter Reason Body Shot 1-year-old boy Head Grandfather, Family dispute, age 46 stray bullet 3-year-old girl Rectum Brother, Accidental age 8 playing with gun 2-year-old girl Head Sniper Sniper, hit by accident 7-year-old girl Eye Gang member, Retaliation age 17 9-year-old girl Head Gang member Retaliation

Age/Sex Complications Days in Outcome Hospital 1-year-old boy Died 3 days later -- Died, grandfather in Prison 3-year-old girl Colostomy 22 Home 2-year-old girl Death -- Died 7-year-old girl Lost eye 7 Home 9-year-old girl Infection, wound 6 Home