‘How Could This Have Happened?’ : Guns: Neighborhood struggles to make sense of tragedy in which a boy shot a playmate to death. The father faces charges under a state firearms safety law.

Around the neighborhood, people are talking about what they saw and heard, almost as if everything will start to make sense somewhere in the telling.

The crack of a single gunshot. Sirens and Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies running through a quiet Long Beach street. A 9-year-old boy trembling and crying as his 7-year-old friend is taken from his house to an ambulance. The mother of the younger child arriving at the house and collapsing silently into the arms of two friends. And finally, the older boy’s father coming home from work and frantically shouting: “How could this have happened?”

Now, the 9-year-old’s father, Alfred Louis Milliner, sits in a Lakewood sheriff’s station cell, held on $10,000 bail because of a 1991 law making adults criminally liable for keeping loaded weapons where children can get them.

Sheriff’s deputies and neighbors said that on Monday the 9-year-old and his schoolmate Jackson Troung, 7, walked a few blocks from Brett Harte School to the elder boy’s home, where the pair often played. No one else was home, and sometime shortly after the two entered the house the older boy found his father’s handgun on the sofa.

The boy apparently knew something about guns because, deputies said, he ejected its magazine. But what he didn’t realize when he pointed the gun and pulled the trigger was that a single bullet remained in the chamber. It struck Troung in the chest. Deputies said the older boy ran down the street to get his aunt, who called 911. Less than an hour later, Troung was pronounced dead at a Lakewood Regional Medical Center.

Deputy Ron Weber said Milliner, 35, was arrested on suspicion of criminal storage of a firearm. Weber said detectives found not only the handgun but a rifle and shotgun that also were not secured. Weber said he did not know whether the two weapons were loaded, why the handgun was on the sofa, or why the boys were alone. Investigators could not be reached for comment.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles county district attorney’s office said Milliner is expected to be arraigned today.

The district attorney’s office has reviewed about half a dozen cases since the Children’s Firearm Accident Protection Act of 1991 went into effect in January, 1992. In one incident, which occurred 10 days after the law went into effect, prosecutors filed charges against a Los Angeles man after his 3-year-old brother found a loaded gun and shot himself in the leg. The man pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years in jail.

The most highly publicized prosecution in the state involved a San Jose man whose 4-year-old grandson killed himself with a loaded gun left on a bedroom floor. The charge eventually was reduced to a misdemeanor, and the man was sentenced to tell to the public his story of how a loaded weapon had affected his family.

If the district attorney’s office chooses to file charges against Milliner, he could face up to three years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

On Tuesday, the Milliner family gathered at the aunt’s house, two doors from where Alfred Milliner lives with his wife and two children in a neat gray stucco bungalow. A family member said that relatives were gathering together to “deal with this tragedy.”

Across the street, three neighborhood women discussed the shooting while their own children played in a yard behind them. They and other neighbors wondered why the gun was out and why it was loaded. Some said the shooting prompted them to lecture their children to never play with guns. All felt sorry for the parents of Jackson Troung and the Milliner boy, who they say will never be able to forget that he shot one of his best friends. But several said that as tragic as the accident was, Milliner should be punished.

“You know what the sad thing is,” one woman said. “(Jackson’s) mother sent him off to school, and he made it through school and over to his friend’s house, but never made it home. And she’ll never see him again.”