Police Raid 10 Homes in Shooting Case : Gangs: Santa Ana officers seize several weapons and arrest a 13-year-old boy but don’t find the gun and suspect they were looking for.

Dozens of police officers raided 10 homes at dawn Thursday, arresting a 13-year-old alleged gang member in connection with the shooting of a rival gang member this week.

The officers also seized several weapons from the homes, but did not find the automatic handgun they believe was used in the Tuesday night shooting or the suspected gunman, identified as Kirbie Lee Golden, 19, of Santa Ana.

Witnesses and the victim, 14-year-old Jose Manuel Patino Cortez, helped police identify the alleged attackers, said Lt. Robert Helton. A third suspect, a 17-year-old Santa Ana gang member, also remained at large.

Cortez was in stable condition Thursday.

Police said the shooting stemmed from a two-month-long feud between Cortez and the 13-year-old, alleged members of rival Santa Ana street gangs.

Investigators said they do not know what the fight was about, but the younger boy, with five or six others, went looking for Cortez on Tuesday night in the area of Flower and Pine streets, Helton said.

The group found Cortez riding his bicycle near there and a fistfight began, police said. Bruised, Cortez was able to break away from the group. But Golden allegedly ran after Cortez and fired, hitting him in the back and arm, Helton said.

Cortez was able to run about one block south in an alley between homes before collapsing next to a home in the 900 block of Chestnut Avenue, police said.

The shooting underlined the difficulty that organizers of gang peace talks are having as they try to expand a six-month-old truce to include more of the city’s gang population.

With tensions still high, members of the gangs believed to be involved in the shooting gathered at Flower Park on Thursday evening and vented their anger about the incident and the “snitching” that followed. But they were brought together to encourage a truce.

Organizer Gilbert Gonzalez, 50, said afterward that it was natural that the half-hour meeting “got hot. One of their gang members got shot.”

He added that the animosity is “a general feeling of not liking somebody going into their area and shooting somebody.”

Contradicting police reports that the alleged shooter was a rival gang member, Gonzalez said the suspect was an outsider who had just come into the neighborhood.

“The beautiful thing about it is that peace continues,” he said. “You always worry, but you know basically that it will continue.”

Older gang members need to participate in the talks to draw the others into true truce, said Fernando Leon, a Garden Grove activist who works with kids in gangs.

“The older guys, the veteranos, have to get involved. When they have youngsters as young as 14 years old they have to tell them to stop,” Leon said before the meeting.

Helton said he also believed that “we’re going to continue to have these flare-ups until all the gangs commit” to the peace talks.”

Police and gang workers say the ages of the youths provide further evidence that ever younger inner-city kids in Orange County are getting involved in some of the most violent aspects of gangs.

County gang probation officers said for the past several years children as young as 8, mostly males, are beginning to commit crimes. Probation officers are dealing with children who have committed firearm violations or armed robberies.

As with any established group, “in order for a gang to survive it has to recruit new members,” said Dallas Stahr, an Orange County deputy probation officer in the gang violence suppression unit.

But Tuesday night’s shooting, he said, might not have been prevented by the talks because “here you have a conflict that has been simmering for two months, and a 13-year-old is looking for revenge on another 14-year-old.”

Times staff writer Gebe Martinez contributed to this report.