Girl, 14, Shot in Hand While Leaving School : Violence: Police seek identity of attacker and companions who fled. Incident is latest in rash of shootings near campuses.

A 14-year-old student was shot in the hand Thursday by a youth who fired into a circle of students walking home from a junior high school, the latest in a rash of shootings near school campuses.

The unidentified girl was treated and released in good condition from a Tustin hospital late Thursday, while police interviewed witnesses and sought clues to the identity of her attacker.

The shooting, which sent fear through the neighborhoods surrounding Lathrop Intermediate School southeast of downtown Santa Ana, was the fifth to occur at or near an Orange County school since fall classes began in September, and the sixth this year. But it was believed to be the first near a junior high school.

It also comes just two days after a 16-year-old cheerleader, Sheila Lorta, was shot in the head and killed while crossing the street in front of Paramount High School in that Los Angeles County city.

“This could have been exactly the same situation,” said Santa Ana community activist Kathy Hernandez, director of religious education at St. Anne’s School, which is across the street from Lathrop and two blocks from the shooting scene. “Fortunately, they hit this little girl in the hand, but it could have been her head. . . .”

The shooting occurred about 2:45 p.m. in the 200 block of East McFadden Avenue, at the corner of Cypress Street, when a group of two or three youths ran across McFadden toward a cluster of students, according to Santa Ana Police Lt. Earl Porter.

Porter said one of the youths pulled out a small-caliber gun and fired several shots at the group of students. One of the bullets hit the girl, Porter said. The youth who fired the gun ran away with his companions.

Police late Thursday could say only that the attackers were “two or three young males.” Porter said investigators did not know whether the youths were of junior high school age or older, or whether the attack was gang-related.

However, a witness told The Times that the incident began with two groups of young boys on opposite sides of McFadden Avenue taunting and gesturing to each other as school let out for the day.

“By the way they were acting you knew they were going to fight,” said a 41-year-old woman who witnessed the shooting from her car.

Suddenly, a shirtless boy who looked about 13 pulled a gun from his pants pocket and charged south across McFadden toward the group on the opposite corner, said the woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution.

Once the boy crossed the street, the woman said, she heard the pop of about four gunshots as he fired at what had, by then, become a larger group of boys and girls walking home from school. She said she did not see anyone struck by the bullets, but did watch as the shirtless youth ran back across McFadden Avenue to the north and disappeared with his friends down an alley.

“At first I thought it was a toy,” the woman said of the gun. “I never thought something like this would happen.”

She described the attacker as about 5 feet, 4 inches tall, with short black hair. She said he was wearing light blue pants and had a white T-shirt tucked in his back pocket.

Liz Robles, a staff organizer for the Orange County Congregation Community Organization, a multicultural interfaith group of community organizations active in Santa Ana, said the latest shooting was likely to frighten people living in the East Side neighborhood near the school--and drive some families indoors.

“It has really become scary for the people who live in these neighborhoods,” Robles said. “Whenever they hear anything of a drive-by or a shooting of any kind . . . some people become so fearful they will stop going out . . . and they won’t allow their children to venture outside.”

Sister Guadalupe Hernandez, principal of St. Anne’s School, said there have been shootings in the general area, but never during school hours and never near either her school or Lathrop across the street.

“I’m scared to death for my children now,” Hernandez said.

The shooting follows the Sept. 18 fatal shooting of a 15-year-old Fullerton High School student less than a block from the campus. Three people, including another Fullerton High student, have been arrested in the slaying of Angel Gonzalez, a killing that police have said was a racially motivated gang attack.

On Sept. 11, two teen-agers were seriously wounded just outside Loara High School in Anaheim in what police there said was also a gang-related shooting.

The same day, a 17-year-old Buena Park High School student was wounded in the leg in an unrelated shooting incident that occurred while he and a friend walked near the school.

On Sept. 10, a Santa Ana police officer wounded a 16-year-old boy while trying to break up a fight between two rival gangs about a block from Santa Ana High School.

Santa Ana High’s basketball court was the scene of a brutal slaying last April, when gang members opened fire, killing Maura Meza, 31, and wounding three of his relatives who had been playing a pickup game of basketball.

Diane Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Santa Unified School District, had little information about the latest shooting Thursday and said Lathrop has not been a troubled school in the past.

She said efforts will be made today to deal with any children who have questions or are emotionally upset over the incident. But she pointed out that the situation did not occur on the school grounds.

“In the schools, our job is to do the best we can to maintain campuses as a safe learning environment, and I think most of us do that,” Thomas said. “But it’s not on the campuses that these tragedies have been taking place. And they are tragedies. So that makes it very difficult.

“But we in Santa Ana Unified work in close concert with the Santa Ana Police Department and . . . with the city to address things jointly.”