2 Teens Shot Outside Anaheim’s Loara High : Crime: Police suspect that the altercation was gang-related, but no arrests have been made. The wounded are in serious condition.

Two teen-agers were seriously wounded Friday afternoon on a street corner outside Loara High School, in the second shooting to mar this week’s opening of Orange County schools.

Bigoberto Nava Adame, 18, and George Lopez, 16, both students at Anaheim High School, were taken to UCI Medical Center in Orange in serious condition after an altercation that police suspect was gang-related.

“It was scary,” said Martin DeAnda, an assistant football coach who was leading a practice in the athletic field near where the shootings occurred about 3 p.m. “You didn’t know which way the bullets would be flying.”

According to Sgt. Paul Mundt of the Anaheim Police Department, the two teen-agers were sitting in Adame’s Mazda, which was parked on Euclid Street near Palais Road, when they were approached by two other teen-agers on foot.

“Some type of challenge was issued,” Mundt said. “We’re not sure exactly what was said and by whom, but some words were said and the victims got out of the car, at which time they were shot.”

Adame suffered multiple gunshot wounds in the shoulder, buttocks and calf, Mundt said, while Lopez was shot once in the abdomen.

The assailants--described as male Latinos about 15 years old, between 5 feet, 4 inches and 5 feet, 8 inches tall with short black hair--then kept firing at the car as they ran north on Euclid, finally throwing a handgun into the shrubbery in front of Marly’s Real Estate City, an office building neighboring the school.

Police later recovered the weapon--a black .38-caliber revolver-- but said that no arrests had been made.

After the incident, Adame and Lopez, both bleeding profusely, drove about half a mile to Lopez’s home in the 1800 block of West Orange Avenue, where paramedics were called.

“I was so scared I almost fainted,” said Lopez’s sister, 24-year-old Laura, who arrived home from work just as the two boys were being carted into ambulances. Adame, she said, was unconscious when the ambulance arrived.

The shootings occurred half an hour after school let out, while the freshman football team was practicing on the athletic field about 100 yards away.

“There were two guys and they ran by the car and they kept firing as they ran,” said Leo Aldeen, the team’s head coach. He said he ordered the players off the field, but let them return after the shooting stopped.

Shane Patrick, 14, said that he and the other players were too busy practicing to notice what was happening until the shots were fired. Then he got a brief look at the two gunmen before being told by the coaches to flee.

The shootings came just two days after an officer-involved shooting ended in the death of a 16-year-old youth about a block from Santa Ana High School. That incident resulted from a wild confrontation between two groups of youths just before 3 p.m. on the first day of school.

The patrol officer fired two shots at the youth, striking him in the torso, after the youngster allegedly pointed a gun at the officer.

Although police said they suspect that the shooting outside Loara was gang-related, the neighborhood surrounding the school is a quiet, middle-class section, with a public library, a city fire station and many single family homes.

“There’s never any trouble at the high school,” said Steve Vasile, 79, who has lived across the street from the site of the shooting for 31 years. “Never. Never had any bullets.”

“We have no gang tension,” said Barry Escoe, Loara’s principal. “Every school has fights, but we don’t even have a high incidence of that. We have been reopened since Thursday and we haven’t had even one disciplinary action.”

At Lopez’s house, badly shaken relatives were trying to piece together what had happened.

“He’s a straight kid, he’s got no problems,” said Lopez’s 22-year-old brother, who declined to give his name. As far as he knows, he said, his brother is not in a gang.

“He doesn’t have very good friends, but he’s a good kid,” he said. “They were just there at the wrong time.”

Staff writers Eric Young and Jodi Wilgoren and correspondent Terry Spencer contributed to this story.