Brooklyn Neighborhood Grieves for Its Mr. Chips : Tragedy: Sadness cuts deeply among pupils, parents after famed principal dies in cross-fire of drug gangs.

The waterfront community of Red Hook is cut off from the rest of Brooklyn, hidden behind the concrete immensity of the Gowanus Expressway. It has long been invisible to most in this mammoth city--except for two things.

One was the great emblem of its poverty, the 25 massive buildings of the Red Hook Houses, the nation’s second-largest public housing project. The other was a widely loved elementary school principal, a slender and dapper man who had turned P.S. 15 into a treasured sanctuary from the drug wars around it.

Patrick Daly, 48, had brought the nation’s eye to the neighborhood. His was a model school, featured on network TV news shows. The principal was an inner-city Mr. Chips, a soft-spoken man with a salt-and-pepper beard. Each day, he would take home those students whose parents failed to pick them up.

These caring ways--this personal commitment--are why the grieving here Friday was so all-embracing and intense. The morning before, Daly was caught in a cross-fire between feuding drug gangs, shot dead as he walked along a central walkway of the Red Hook projects. He had gone there to look for a 9-year-old who left school in tears after getting into a fight.

“To think that an angel of a man was sacrificed over drugs: We’ll have no Christmas here this year; there are no holidays in Red Hook without Mr. Daly,” said Bernadette Roche, one of hundreds of parents who came to the school, looking for comfort.

They hugged their children and their children’s teachers, then gathered in the auditorium for words of solace. People wrote prayers on sheets of paper taped to the outside brick walls: We love you, Mr. Daly . . . I am sure you are a principal in heaven. The parents formed a cortege and carried flowers to the place where the principal had fallen.

Young children, confused by so many big, adult tears, questioned their parents about the meaning of all this sadness.

“This was all about drugs, wasn’t it?” asked Marie Ebel, 11.

Her mother, Jean Ebel, answered: “Now you see why I tell you to always stay in the house.”

Police have arrested Shamel Burroughs, 17, and charged him with second-degree murder. Two more suspects are being sought.

To some here, the simple fact of an arrest is remarkable in itself. “Usually, if someone gets shot, no one talks; maybe that’ll change now,” said Lakisha Fonseca, 22, who had been a student at the school when Daly was the assistant principal.

There was a lot of talk about change on Friday--how all this grief might coalesce into something spiritual, galvanizing the 10,000 residents of the Red Hook Houses to succeed where the city has failed and rid the community of its unrelenting violence.

“The time is past for appealing to the hearts of the mayor and the police chief,” said Brenda Gibbs, 32. “It’s time to appeal to the hearts of the drug dealers. Some of them have got kids too.”

Real determination seemed to grip the crowd, a zeal to make Daly’s death a turning point. Many compared him to Robert F. Kennedy or even to Jesus himself, men who died, they said, so that they should live better.

But a reflex of skepticism was in the air too. “Give it a week and everything will be back to the same,” said Walter Bridge, 42. “Kids here don’t even run from gunshots. You’ve got 9-year-olds carrying guns here.”

A man with a handgun under his brown leather coat was willing to praise Daly, “a guy who helped me a lot.” But that did not change “the facts of the life in the ghetto, where transactions must go on.”

P.S. 15, located in one of New York’s worst neighborhoods, was one of the city’s safest schools. Would that all change now with Daly gone? The sense of loss was enormous.

Daly, married and a father of three, had been at the school since it opened in 1966. He had been the principal since 1986. An overwhelming majority of parents had known him when they themselves had been students.

He was P.S. 15’s continuity, the first to arrive each morning and the last to leave at night. No one could recall him ever raising his voice. He had done a million favors.

Daly was a soft touch when Annie McPhatter was short on her rent money. He spent extra time with Evelyn Perales’ older boy, Luis, who has a learning disability and a tendency to berate himself. He stuck with Toni Jones-Thomas when she wanted to give up on all that complicated math and skip the graduate equivalency diploma.

So it was just like Daly to be wandering in Red Hook, looking for a boy who had run home upset. “I used to laugh at him, walking in the projects, places I wouldn’t even go,” said parent Edwin Gonzalez. “But you know, even the toughest hoodlums would stop their carrying on and say: ‘How you doin,’ Mr. Daly?’ ”

The Red Hook Houses begin just across the street from the school. Each is six stories high, connected by a looping string of asphalt pathways. Every plaza and doorway is contested turf among drug dealers whose primary commodity is crack cocaine.

Wild sprays of gunfire are so routine that many residents sleep on their floors to be safe from stray bullets that might come in a window. A crackle of gunshots rarely sends the curious to peek through their curtains anymore.

Nevertheless, Judith Torres looked. “There’s an old man down,” she said to her husband, Eddie. He came to the window, then hurried down six flights of stairs. He did not know it was Daly until he was right beside the body.

The principal was shot in the chest. “He couldn’t talk because blood was coming out of his mouth,” said Torres, a security guard and ex-Marine. “I began to remove his clothing. There was no consideration around us. This man was down, and the people kept right on shooting.

“Mr. Daly had a pulse going. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes. He just couldn’t believe it. I kept telling him: ‘Don’t give up, Mr. Daly.’ The only words he managed to say were: ‘Thank you.’ ”

Torres has two children at P.S. 15. He told them Thursday that their principal was dead, but Bianca, 6, the older one, refused to believe him.

Friday morning, she saw Daly’s picture flash across the TV screen. “See, I told you, daddy,” she said happily. “There’s Mr. Daly right there.”