Fear Marks Venice After 2 Homicides : Crime: Some residents of the Oakwood neighborhood keep children home from school. They worry that a 2-week-old gang war may escalate.

The Oakwood section of Venice does not look like a war zone. Most days, despite troublesome street crime, it is a place of quaint bungalows and front-yard vegetable gardens where you don’t need to call before dropping by with slices of fresh-baked pie.

But fear gripped the ethnically diverse neighborhood Monday as jittery residents kept children home from school and shared worries with neighbors that two Sunday night killings would escalate a two-week war between black and Latino gangs that usually live side by side in peace.

As police promised to continue stepped-up patrols in the half-square-mile community, residents awaited a Thursday visit from Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams. The community meeting was planned before the recent spate of violence, which is evoking frightening memories of a 1979 war between the same two gangs that took at least four lives.

“There’s going to be retaliation for this,” predicted a resident who lives near the site of one Sunday shooting, which left one man dead and two women wounded. “This ain’t the end of it.”

Officials at Westminster Elementary School reported that a third of the roughly 400 schoolchildren in the neighborhood stayed home Monday, a larger than usual number.

Last week, in response to continued shooting incidents--including one in which police were fired upon for the second time in two weeks--worried parents were showing up to take children home early after hearing a car engine backfire near the school, said Principal Betty Coleman.

Police said there have been no arrests from Sunday’s two fatal shootings.

In one, a man said to be affiliated with the black gang was killed and two black women were wounded in an apparent gang attack by two Latino men, police said. In the other, two hours later, a black man with a handgun opened fire on three Latino men parked in a car, killing one and wounding the other two.

Police were unsure if the second attack was gang-related or if the two incidents were linked.

“You have gang rivalry, racial rivalry and narcotics rivalry,” said Detective Bernard Rogers of the West Bureau CRASH unit, a Westside anti-gang detail that has put about half of its forces in Oakwood over the past two weeks. “You have very intense hatred and very, very severe criminals.”

Police said the recent outbreak appeared to have been sparked two weeks ago by the shooting of a Latino man affiliated with the V-13 gang. The incident had nothing to do with gangs, but inflamed tensions between the two groups. Since then there have been at least 10 shooting incidents, including the two attacks on police.

The neighborhood, once predominantly black, is now about half Latino, and gentrification is bringing in growing numbers of white professionals, drawn to affordable housing prices only blocks from the beach.

The shifts have created tensions on the issues of development and crime, with some critics saying gentrification is pushing blacks out.

“The big developers are sitting there twiddling their thumbs, saying, as soon as they kill each other, it’s going to be Marina Venice,” said activist Melvyn Hayward Sr., a frequent gentrification critic.

Stubborn gangs are believed responsible for firebombing the homes of anti-crime activists this year. They have also frustrated the efforts of a Nation of Islam security firm that was fired last month after failing to control drug trading and crime at 15 federally subsidized apartment buildings there.

But violence reached new levels Sunday, shattering a reported truce between the Venice Shoreline Crips, the black gang, and V-13, a Latino gang, both of which have members in all parts of the compact neighborhood.

Some nervous residents were staying inside out of fear of more street shootings while trying to cope with the idea of their usually friendly neighborhood as a free-fire zone.

“I love the neighborhood and I’ve always gotten along,” said Lupe Gonzalez, a telephone operator who has lived in Oakwood for 23 years.

Lately, Gonzalez said, she rarely goes out to play with her two grandchildren in the front yard once it gets dark.

“It’s sad that we can’t just enjoy being out here,” she said. “I don’t want to be a shut-in.”

Across the street, Marion Vaughn has taken similar precautions. She has been driving her daughter to school since the recent violence began.

The Vaughns’ living room wall still bears a hole where a stray bullet smashed through the window during a gunfight outside last year.