Garden Grove Patrol Officer Slain : Witnesses: Residents of quiet street awaken to gunfire. They rush out to call for help on police radio, aid dying officer.

The gunfire erupted and Jessie Brown sprang from his bed, pausing only to hop into a pair of turquoise shorts. A moment later, he was beside Garden Grove Officer Howard E. Dallies Jr., calling police on the radio in the officer’s cruiser--its lights still flashing--and groping for the bleeding man’s pulse.

Around him, Brown’s neighbors on this quiet block of single-family homes were also spilling into the street, shocked from sleep by the shots that took Dallies’ life.

“I knew right off the bat it was gunfire because it was fast, it was rapid,” said Brown, 43, a retired Marine who is now studying to be a police officer himself. “It was loud. It woke everybody up.”

“There was steam coming off his breath, and from the blood seeping onto the street,” added Charles North, 29, a political consultant who scurried onto the scene in a T-shirt and boxer shorts as he dialed 911 on his cellular phone.

“When it happened, it was kind of scary. Now I’m just kind of angry. . . . It just seems like an injustice.”

By the time Brown put down the receiver and ducked back out of the police car, four more cruisers were speeding down Aldgate Avenue toward him.

As the group huddled over Dallies, a neighbor said, sadly, “He’s dead.” But just then, Brown recalled, the officer moved his leg, as if to signal that he was still alive.

Charles Wright, 31, another Aldgate resident, said Dallies’ gun remained in his snapped holster as the officer lay, breathing erratically, with empty bullet shells on the ground nearby. Dallies did not have a ticket book in his hand, Wright said, who was cradling his infant daughter as he spoke near the scene of the shooting Tuesday morning.

Police officers--some called to the scene from their homes--had tears in their eyes as they tended to their slain colleague.

“The police said ‘Hang on, Howard, we love you,’ ” recalled Christine North, Charles’ mother. “That touched me. They cared so much for him, they tried so hard to save him. I hoped and prayed he would make it, but he didn’t.”

Officers and paramedics moved neighbors aside and whisked Dallies to the hospital within minutes, but Wright’s parents kept coffee brewing throughout the morning as residents of the neighborhood stood on their neat lawns reviewing events with investigators. Police closed the street to traffic and set up floodlights to aid their search for evidence.

Dallies was hit by three slugs, but police found other shots sprayed around the area. One lodged in a Jeep parked near the body. Another landed in the Norths’ driveway.

“I think it was pretty scary,” Lanette Mendez said. “If it was any closer it would have been in our front yard.”

The shooting occurred in front of 10101 Aldgate Ave., a yellow house with green trim where Christmas lights still dangle from the eaves. Though the narrow street is just a few hundred feet from busy Brookhurst Avenue, residents said they are unfamiliar with violent crime.

“We never have any problems,” Christine North said of the neighborhood she has called home for seven years. “No one robs us, no one breaks in and we don’t have any gang activity. . . . You see these things on TV, and you think it’s all playacting, but to some it’s real.”

“I don’t expect anything to happen here,” added Irma Houpt, Mendez’s mother, who moved from Westminster to Garden Grove eight years ago, after someone was shot in her back yard. “You felt safe. Until today.”

“It was pretty frightening. My son’s room is right here,” Houpt added, pointing to a window facing the street where Dallies was shot. “He sleeps on a bunk bed. He could have been shot, that’s what I thought.”

But while the killing shook his neighbors, Brown, the 290-pound ex-Marine who saw combat in Da Nang, said he felt no fear as he bolted to Dallies’ aid.

“No, it doesn’t scare me,” he said, taking a break Tuesday afternoon from studying for an English exam. “I’ve been close to death before. There ain’t nothing new about going out to do a job you believe in.”

Brown, 43, a father of two young daughters now studying criminal justice, said he has wanted to be a police officer since he volunteered as a cadet for his hometown force in Texas as a teen-ager. Seeing Dallies die Tuesday morning does not deter him.

“I still feel I have to do some duty,” Brown said Tuesday, his Marines Corps badges, ribbons and citations gleaming from his living-room wall. “They need other people helping people out there. The world is changing fast. You need a lot of good men on the street.

“Somebody’s got to do it,” said Brown. “It’s just like the military. You’ve got to have somebody to fight for the country, go in there, die if you have to. . . . It’s the same with police work. Some of them die, some of them live on. You got to do it.”