Man Dies in Schoolyard Shooting : Santa Paula: Police say the slaying of a gang member during a Halloween party may be retaliation for a drive-by killing in September.

Santa Paula police on Sunday were investigating the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old man during a Halloween party as a possible gang retaliation for the killing of a local man last month.

But the family of the teen-ager killed Saturday night disputed this interpretation, saying he died after helping a friend in a fistfight unrelated to gang activity.

Joey Lara was shot twice in the back about 9 p.m. Saturday in the yard of McKevett Elementary School on Pleasant Street, Santa Paula police said.

The two killings marked the only fatal shootings in the city this year, police said.

Witnesses said the shooting occurred during a fistfight that broke out minutes after Lara and about 15 other youths left a Halloween party across the street from the school.

Friends rushed Lara to Santa Paula Memorial Hospital, about a five-minute drive from the school. He died about 9:25 p.m., minutes after his mother and other family members arrived at the hospital.

Police and Lara’s family agreed that he was a member of a local gang, but family members insisted that his death was unrelated to his gang activities.

Detective Sgt. Gary Marshall said police believe that Lara may have been killed by a rival gang that has been feuding with Lara’s gang for at least the past six months.

Marshall said police suspect the gang feud led to the Sept. 23 drive-by slaying of 20-year-old Richard Brian Gutierrez.

Gutierrez was a member of the Bad Boys, the gang that police say is feuding with the Crazy Boyz, Lara’s gang.

Police have identified suspects in the death of Gutierrez, which they say was Santa Paula’s first fatal drive-by shooting. But they have not made arrests because other gang members and those who associate with them have not cooperated with their investigation, Marshall said, adding that police are running into the same lack of cooperation in their investigation of Lara’s killing.

Some witnesses know Lara’s assailant, Marshall said. But he said witnesses are not cooperating because they are afraid of retaliation or, if they are gang members, do not want to be viewed as traitors.

“For the gang members, it’s loyalty, this sort of perverted machismo thing” that keeps them from talking to police, even if it was one of the members of their gang who was killed, he said. “It’s frustrating.”

The 21-year-old woman who hosted the Halloween party said Lara was shot by a person standing in a corner of the schoolyard that was not visible from the street, near where the fight occurred.

A gunfight occurred, said the woman, who did not want to be identified, with at least 10 shots fired back and forth across the schoolyard.

Police believe that the shooting may have been unrelated to the fistfight and that the assailant may have staked out the party, knowing Lara was there.

“He may have been someone lying in wait” who took advantage of the fight to begin shooting, Marshall said.

Witnesses have talked to Lara’s family, however, and told them that neither the fight nor the shooting was based on gang affiliations, family members said.

“It wasn’t a gang-related fight,” said Ophelia Abel, Lara’s aunt. Abel was one of about a dozen relatives who went to Lara’s home on Prieto Street to comfort the victim’s mother, sister and other family members.

Abel said people at the party told them that a fight broke out between two boys for an unknown reason, and others, including Lara, jumped in to help their friends, who they thought were going to get hurt. “It just escalated,” Abel said.

Abel and other family members said they didn’t know who fired the gunshots during the fight.

The victim’s mother, Anna Lara, 38, said her son had been rebellious since his father left the family when Joey was 9.

“He took it out on me because he thought it was my fault,” Anna Lara said, her eyes tearing up as she talked.

But, she said, Joey was devoted to his friends, and it would have been in character for him to help a friend in a fight.