A Stray Bullet Kills Resident Who Stood Up to the Gangs : North Hollywood: While shooing away graffiti-writers, the man, 59, is slain when a rival group arrives on the scene. His family cannot pay for a funeral.

He was one of the few residents of a gang-ridden North Hollywood neighborhood who stood up to the pandilleros, frequently telling them to move on when they congregated nearby.

But to the horror of his neighbors, Francisco Gudino Serratos died at the hands of a gang member Thursday evening.

The 59-year-old welder was shooing away gang members who were painting graffiti on a garage he rented when the group’s rivals happened on the scene and opened fire, hitting him with a stray bullet, said Detective Mike Coffey of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The incident left residents of the largely Latino, working-class neighborhood in the 6800 block of Radford Avenue shocked and demoralized Friday. And, with the loss of their only breadwinner, Serratos’ diabetic wife and five children are in such bad financial shape they cannot even afford to pay for the funeral, a family friend said.

“We’re told all the time to do something about our community,” said Chris Gossett, 24, a friend of the Serratos family. “And here’s one man who tried for 20 years and look what happened.”

“I was afraid before, and now I’m even more afraid,” said Margaret Arroyo, manager of the two-story, gray and white apartment house where Serratos lived for 20 years.

Serratos was the 437th person to die in a gang-related homicide in Los Angeles County this year, law enforcement authorities said. Typically, about 10% of such victims are innocent bystanders such as Serratos, and the rest are gang members, according to a report prepared by the county district attorney’s office and released last spring.

The bullet that struck Serratos in the neck about 8:50 p.m. was meant for members of the Radford Avenue gang who had been tagging his garage door with bright blue spray paint, Coffey said.

Serratos, a husky man with a black mustache and gray sideburns, had calmly persuaded the gang members to stop scrawling their names on the garage when shots were fired at the group by members of a rival gang, who were on foot, Coffey said. No one else was wounded, he said.

Serratos’ widow, Maria, heard the shots, and, not knowing it was her husband who had been gunned down, telephoned Arroyo and asked her to call 911, the apartment manager said.

“She never thought it would be her husband” because he had not been attacked before, although he frequently asked gangsters to leave the area, Arroyo said. “Now, all she can do is cry.”

When paramedics arrived, Serratos was taken to AMI Medical Center, where he died an hour later, Coffey said.

No suspects had been arrested late Friday, police said.

Eight days before Serratos was killed, a car driven by a motorist who was allegedly drunk careened into his living room at 2 a.m., crushing the window, outer wall and many of the family’s possessions, said Rolando Molina, a spokesman for the family. The accident and the slaying have left Maria Serratos, whose children range in age from 14 to 24, nearly destitute, Molina said.

“He was a quiet man, but he did love his children and wife . . . that’s the main reason none of the kids can talk” about their father’s murder, Molina said. The family finds the killing particularly incomprehensible because “he usually did go out . . . and say ‘get out of here,’ and they did,” she said.

Forcing back the tears, Molina said: “This time, they decided to shoot him senselessly.”