City Stunned by Weekend Shooting Toll: 3 Dead, 4 Hurt : Crime: Police have no suspects in the three separate incidents. Gang members may have been to blame in all cases.

A 14-year-old girl’s dreams of being an attorney or model, and a young Mexican man’s quest to join the U.S. Army ended in death on El Monte sidewalks in a series of bloody weekend incidents that police called the worst violence in the city in more than a decade.

In all, seven people were shot, three fatally, in three separate crimes. On Wednesday, police still had no suspects in the killings.

“Three (dead) in one weekend is rather high,” said Tom Armstrong, head of the city’s Detective Bureau. “Ten or 12 years ago, we had three killed at one time, but they were all at a bar.”

Last year, El Monte logged 14 homicides. But the count so far this year stands at 22, Armstrong said.

“Countywide, a lot of the crime has to do with the economy,” Armstrong said. “People are out of work and out of money, and those on the borderline have gone over to the other (criminal) side.”

The toll of dead and wounded prompted Mayor Patricia Wallach to confer this week with Police Chief Wayne Clayton to beef up patrols and the work of the Police Department’s existing anti-gang program. The chief will report on his efforts at the City Council’s next meeting, Dec. 8.

Those efforts should be helped by 10 additional police officers and eight community service officers the department plans to hire soon, Wallach said. Earlier this year, the City Council raised the utility tax to 7% to hire the added officers and decided to use drug forfeiture money to pay the salaries of the community service officers.

“We’re trying to go into a preventive mode, but it’s going to take some time,” Wallach said. “Officers can’t prevent everything from happening, but they can make a difference in trying to prevent it.”

Two of the weekend shootings may have involved gang members committing robberies, and one of the shootings is believed to have been a gang retaliation, Armstrong said.

El Monte has four or five gangs, but Wallach said only one is actively engaged in crime. The others are mainly neighborhood affiliations that stretch back decades and whose members do not usually feud, she said.

The latest crime spree began at 8:50 p.m. Friday, when 19-year-old Mexican immigrant Martin Marquez was gunned down as he was chatting with four other people in the driveway outside his home in the 2700 block of Maxson Road. A robber approached the group on foot, demanded money and shot Marquez, who died later at Greater El Monte Community Hospital.

Saturday evening, Emanuel Plaza, a 37-year-old restaurant employee, was accosted by robbers as he left his restaurant job in the 3500 block of North Peck Road. The assailants shot Plaza in the head, took his money and stole his 1986 Mercury Cougar. Plaza was in serious condition at County-USC Medical Center on Wednesday.

On Sunday, at 9:15 p.m., just blocks away from the Marquez shooting, five people were hit by bullets when gang members opened fire on a crowd at the Little Five Points Liquor Store at 2602 Mountain View Road.

Killed were 19-year-old gang member David Tornell, whom police had been seeking for two burglaries in the city, and an innocent bystander, 14-year-old Alin Garcia, a freshman at El Monte High School who, family members said, had hoped to become a lawyer or a model.

The wounded included Sonia Abraham, 15, of West Covina; David Hernandez, 17, of El Monte, whom police identified as a gang member; and Juan Flores, 46, also of El Monte.

The shootings stunned many area residents who said this week they were unused to such violence in the predominantly Latino city of 106,209.

“There are a few gang members, yes. But you ignore them, they ignore you,” said Marquez’s aunt, Maria Marquez, in whose Maxson Road home the young immigrant had lived for 1 1/2 years.

“There’s never been a shooting here before,” Maria Marquez said, as her two small children played on the floor, beneath a mantel decorated with flowers and candles dedicated to the memory of her slain nephew.

Born in the tiny village of Villa Guerrero, Martin Marquez left his native Mexico and his family of 11 brothers and sisters to better himself in the United States, said his aunt. He worked 12-hour shifts at a local factory making plastic purses. Despite his illegal resident status, he was trying to get into the Army when he was killed, she said.

“He wanted to rise in life,” Maria Marquez said. “He would go to work and then home. He never had money or time to mess around.”

Seven blocks away, at the busy intersection where five residential streets meet in a tangle of stop signs and the orange neon of the Little Five Points Liquor Store sign rises like a beacon above the surrounding stucco houses, residents stood on the sidewalk earlier this week, talking about the “accident” that took the life of Garcia.

“It’s the worst that I’ve seen,” a 40-year-old man who declined to give his name said of the bloodshed. “Maybe the gang members came from outside the city, because it’s usually calm here, like now.”

Meanwhile, about a mile away in a small apartment, Alin’s mother, Lourdes Gomez, 33, sorted through her daughter’s belongings and recalled her last night alive. Alin had gone to the store with her friend, Sonia, who was wounded in the shooting, to use a pay telephone to call another girlfriend, Gomez said.

“I told her, ‘OK, but be careful,’ ” Gomez recalled, her eyes filling with tears.

As a first generation Mexican-American, and tall for her age at nearly 5 foot 7, Alin was a confident, accomplished teen-ager with many interests, her mother said. She was a catcher and a standout batter in the San Jose Senior Little League. She also liked to draw, write poetry and spin contradictory adolescent dreams of being a lawyer, a social worker or a model when she grew up, Gomez said.

“She loved animals. She loved people,” her mother said. “I know where she is now. She’s with God.”

The Gomez family, like that of Marquez, is scrambling to find money to pay funeral expenses.