O.C. Teen Remains in Deep Coma : Crime: Friends of youth speared by rod in beach parking lot say ‘nobody wanted to fight.’

Just steps away from where her teen-age son lay in a deep coma, a tearful Kathy Woods could only shake her head Sunday and wonder why.

“This was just random violence,” Woods said of the attack Friday night on her 17-year-old son that has shattered her life and left the community shaken. “My son is not the type to start trouble.”

Steve Woods, 17, a San Clemente High School senior, was with a group of friends that night when they were assaulted by about a dozen suspected gang members in a parking lot at San Clemente’s Calafia Beach County Park, police said. Steve Woods, the only person seriously injured, remains on life support at Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Mission Viejo.

The high school senior suffered a gruesome head wound during the melee. He was speared above the right ear by the metal rod of a paint roller, which lodged in his head and nearly protruded through to the other side. The makeshift weapon, which was removed surgically, caused an injury to his brain so severe and so unusual that doctors talk gingerly about his prognosis.

“From a medical standpoint, it’s just a matter of will he survive,” Dr. Thomas E. Shaver, a trauma surgeon, said. “When something goes into the brain, you know it’s big-time trouble. It’s a watch-and-wait situation.”

Immediately after the attack, sheriff’s deputies spread out through the community and arrested nine people on suspicion of attempted murder. The suspects, who range in age from 16 to 20 years old, are all from San Clemente. Police said they are all either gang members or gang affiliates.

Other deputies will be stationed at San Clemente High School today and crisis counselors will offer help to students who need it.

“It’s a horrible incident that happened and it involved some of our students,” said Jim Walshe, a vice principal at San Clemente High School. “We’re just going to be there for the kids, and if they need us, we’ll be ready to help.”

Not only was the victim a popular student, but several of the suspects are students or had attended the school in the past, officials said.

“The biggest concern is just keeping everyone calm and not seeing it escalate,” Jane Porphir, a youth counselor for San Clemente police services, said. “At a time like this we usually see a lot of kids in tears and we see a lot of kids pulling together. We all need each other now more than ever before.”

Steve Woods’ friends--including three who were with him at the beach--echoed his mother’s question: Why?

Nothing had been said to prompt a fight, they said in interviews Sunday at the hospital, and there was little warning before the group was attacked.

“Nobody . . . wanted to fight. We were just trying to get out of there,” said one San Clemente 17-year-old, who is a student at Horizon High School based in Santa Ana.

The evening began, the teen-agers said, with the San Clemente-Mater Dei football game at San Clemente High School, which started about 7:30 p.m.

Steve Woods, who preferred surfing to organized high school sports, went to the game to be with his schoolmates. He was more into the camaraderie of the evening than the game itself, said his sister, Shellie, 26.

“Steve is to himself,” Shellie Woods, also of San Clemente, said of her brother, who also worked as a waiter at the San Clemente Denny’s. “He had lots of friends. That’s why everybody is so upset.”

Even before the game ended, Steve Woods had joined two other senior boys and two freshmen girls in a 1966 Suburban truck and headed for a gathering at the beach.

It could have been a typical end to a typical week. They could just as easily have gone to the San Clemente pier, or a north San Clemente beach called 204s, as they often did. But they went to Calafia, a beach the kids call “state park” with a parking lot at the bottom of a steep hill.

The four carloads of friends--about 11 people--arrived just after 9 p.m. and were hanging out in the parking lot, barely noticing a couple of carloads of people on the driveway up the hill. The Horizon High student, who was in his 1993 Nissan truck, offered a ride to two in his group who had to go home.

As he was trying to exit the parking lot, he was the first to encounter trouble, he said.

As he drove up the hill, he was confronted by what San Clemente police identify as members of a local gang. They got out of their two cars. They yelled at him and he stopped and remained in his truck.

“A group of (guys) jumped out. They were yelling at us in Spanish and one guy punched me in the face,” he said.

Seeing he was badly outnumbered, the Horizon High student drove back down the hill to warn the others. Heeding his alert, they jumped into their vehicles and roared up the hill, trying to get past the group of 10 to 15 people, who were now heading for them on foot, some carrying chains, and at least one guy with a tennis racket, said the 17-year-old San Clemente high school student who drove the Suburban.

Steve Woods was riding in the passenger seat of the Suburban, the lead car. The small caravan ran the gauntlet of strangers, who by then lined the right side of the roadway. As the cars passed them, the strangers began breaking out the windows and hurling objects.

Three of the windows in the Suburban were shattered, including the one next to Steve Woods.

“We all ducked” to avoid the breaking glass, said the Suburban’s driver. “We all sat up after we passed, but Steve kind of slumped over.”

Then they saw something protruding from his head. “I could just see the hook coming out,” the Suburban’s driver said of the paint roller handle.

Nobody had seen how he was hit. No one had seen Steve Woods stick his head from the Suburban.

But when they saw how badly he was hurt, they headed frantically for Samaritan Medical Center in San Clemente. Before they arrived, Steve Woods had stopped breathing and turned blue, the driver said.

At Samaritan Medical Center, doctors resuscitated Steve Woods and quickly decided to send him to the trauma center at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center.

There, a team of doctors and nurses operated.

“Unfortunately, it damaged the base of the brain,” said Dr. Bruce Moffatt, a neurosurgeon who carefully removed the straight, blunt roller, which had penetrated the right temporal lobe and was only stopped by the bone of the skull on the other side of his head.

Moffatt added that this part of the brain controls all the functions that keep a person awake and functioning, and “other than the brain stem, the most critical part of the brain.”

Moffatt said the first three or four days are the most critical to Wood’s survival because that’s when the most swelling occurs.

Sunday, San Clemente was a community in shock.

Prayers were said at local church services for the victim and his family.

“It’s such a senseless injury to a young man whose whole future is in front of him,” said Sheriff’s Lt. Tom Davis, acting chief of police in San Clemente. “All they were doing was running away from a situation that got worse.”

By 5 p.m. Saturday, four adults and five juveniles had been arrested. The adults were identified as Juan Alcocer, 20; Pascual Guerrero, 19; Balfred Brito, 19, and Arturo Villalobos, 20.

The suspects are all gang members or affiliated with the main gang in San Clemente, Davis said. The gang has about 100 to 140 known members, although only about 40 are active.

While San Clemente has experienced some gang-related violence in the past, this is the first time local officials can remember that suspected gang members have seriously attacked a group with no gang ties.

“There’s always the problems between the gangs, but they never mess around with the other kids,” said Monica Vejarano, a gang prevention counselor with the nonprofit Community Services Program who has worked in San Clemente. “This is really unusual.”

Times Staff Writer Leslie Berkman contributed to this story.