Killings Signal Advancing Urban Ills : Violence: Recent shootings that left two teen-agers dead are making parents realize that the Valley is an increasingly dangerous place to raise children.

This was supposed to be the place where children grew up worrying about pimples and who to take to the prom, not about being gunned down in front of their locker or at the corner pizza joint.

But three shootings in recent days that left two teen-agers dead and five injured capture in stark colors the reality that San Fernando Valley parents are forced to confront: The suburbs are an increasingly treacherous place to grow up, no longer immune to the most merciless of society’s ills.

The ring of mountains that pens in summer smog and punches holes in winter clouds is no longer a barrier against the steady advance of urban violence.

“It’s everywhere,” said Brent Carpenter, a Van Nuys resident who lives with his three young children on the same street where he grew up. “I don’t care if it’s Beverly Hills or the Valley or Irvine. Where you live doesn’t have any bearing anymore.”

Like Carpenter, parents across the Valley responded with horror to the fatal shooting Monday of a Reseda High student. But the death of 17-year-old Michael Shean Ensley was made even more horrifying by the fact that his alleged killer is a 15-year-old classmate, football player Robert Heard.

Just hours after Ensley collapsed on the pavement in the senior quad, 16-year-old Cleveland High School student Rocio Delgado was shot and killed as she walked along a Northridge street. Two others were wounded in the attack, and the killers are still being sought.

And just last week, three teen-agers were wounded in a shootout outside San Fernando High School.

The Valley long ago ceased to be the Anglo middle-class enclave it once was. Its collection of white, black and brown and rich, poor and middle class closely matches the city as a whole, blurring the traditional distinction between the Valley and the rest of Los Angeles.

But perceptions die hard and residents struggle to accept the fact that the problems of there now exist here.

“It’s extremely scary,” said Carla Nino, the mother of a 16-year-old high school student. “Everybody is . . . at the mercy of what society is doing. We are destroying ourselves.”

Nino, a hospital administrator, said her son calls every day after school to let her know that he arrived home safely. At night, he calls to let her know whom he is with, where he is going and how long he will be gone.

Still she worries. Not only about her son’s safety, but that his always being on guard will rob him of some of the carefree innocence that is one of the few rewards of adolescence.

“You should not have to feel that you can’t enjoy yourself without having a certain level of fear,” she said. “That’s no way to grow up. It’s so sad.”

George Butterfield, deputy director of the National School Safety Center, said concerns such as Nino’s are universal. “That feeling is pretty much growing in suburbs around the country,” Butterfield said. “It’s the same story everywhere: ‘Why here in our neighborhood?’

“Part of what we are dealing with here is people who have been behind the curve to what is actually happening,” Butterfield said. “They are behind because they thought of crime as something that happens only in an urban area or in the ghetto. But it isn’t.”

So what to do?

The traditional response has been to flee to safer areas. Towns like Santa Clarita and Thousand Oaks boomed in the 1980s, capitalizing on their low crime rates and safe schools. But with Southern California mired in recession, that mobility is gone.

People who want to--or must--stay in Southern California are finding other ways to cope.

Carpenter, for instance, coaches youth soccer teams with the attitude that lessons learned in athletics can be applied to life.

“The winner is not who wins the game, but who wins the whole season,” Carpenter said. “I tell them they don’t have to get the goal every time. It’s hard to teach the little kids that, but by high school it’s too late.”

Allan Kakassy, a social studies teacher at Granada Hills High School, said more adults must take responsibility for the disaffection and despair that many young people feel. More money, he said, should be spent on programs that address the causes of youth violence to head it off before it ends in death.

“The nitty-gritty is we have to pay to guarantee our young people the sort of education they are entitled to and, indeed, the sort of education we ourselves received,” he said. “The shame is that we could do so much more.”

And until the causes of the violence are addressed, no place will remain safe.

“A killing that occurs in public school could just as easily occur at the Ralphs market,” said Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

“It’s startling because people feel a school should be one of the safest environments in the community.”