Boy, 2, Pronounced Brain-Dead After Easter Shootout : Violence: Two men have been arrested in the Balboa Park gun battle that seriously injured two adults. Police believe a gang dispute was involved.

A 2-year-old Los Angeles boy was pronounced brain-dead Monday, the victim of an Easter party shootout that left the toddler mortally wounded and two adults seriously injured.

Police arrested two suspects after the incident at Balboa Park in Encino.

Ryan Brown was being kept alive with a ventilator at Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys until his organs could be taken for transplant, his mother and a pediatric nurse said. A hospital spokesman said Monday night that the infant was still on the ventilator, but it would be disconnected during the night.

The boy was struck in the back of the head Sunday evening as his mother loaded him into a car and frantically tried to leave the park as a fistfight escalated into gunfire and broke up a barbecue attended by about 80 to 100 people who learned about it from flyers. “He was standing up in the front seat and the bullet came through the back window,” Ryan’s mother, Tamara Lee, said Monday.

“There were a lot of kids up there and my kid was the only one to get shot,” Lee said. “And the people shooting up there have kids too.”

Police blamed members of rival Crips factions for the gunfight, which erupted after a day of feasting and Easter egg hunting and sent dozens of picnickers diving for safety under bushes and cars.

Within minutes of the shootout, which was reported by residents of the park’s quiet neighborhood, police arrested Larry Shaw, 31, of Van Nuys and John Karl Brown, 26, of Reseda on suspicion of attempted murder.

Both men were being held without bail at the Los Angeles Police Department’s West Valley Division. The charges against Shaw were expected to be upgraded to murder today, but Brown was expected to be released because witnesses have told police that he was not carrying a gun during the shootout, Detective Rick Swanston said.

Swanston said three to six people may have been involved in the gunfight and that more arrests are expected.

The injured included Damon Keith Napier, 29, of Sherman Oaks, who was shot once in the abdomen and was in stable condition at Encino-Tarzana Regional Medical Center, and James Anthony Wright, 30, of North Hills, who was in critical but stable condition at the same hospital with two bullet wounds to the back, Police Lt. George Rock said.

Rock and Swanston said that the origins of the gun battle were unclear but that it seemed to stem from a dispute that began last week between rival gang members and resurfaced at Sunday’s picnic. What began as a fistfight quickly escalated into a full-fledged gun battle when members of the rival gangs pulled out handguns, including several semiautomatic weapons, police said.

Ryan, his mother and his aunt were among those picnickers who, sensing the tension, had started to pack up and go home.

Lee said Monday that she had been so anxious to leave the park that she was about to take Ryan to a nearby bus stop rather than wait for the man who drove them to the picnic.

Before she could grab her son from the front seat of the car, she said she saw someone walk toward the vehicle with a gun in each hand and begin firing.

Lee said she ducked behind the car door. After the shooting stopped, she and her sister grabbed Ryan and ran into the middle of Burbank Boulevard to flag down help. Another picnicker, whom police had not identified, drove them to Valley Presbyterian’s emergency room.

Lee and about 15 relatives and friends kept a vigil at Ryan’s bedside, then held a news conference outside the hospital to plead for help in finding his killers and for money to pay for his funeral.

“I didn’t plan on burying my son after Easter,” Lee said.