Forum Targets O.C. Youth Violence : Crime: Meeting, held in wake of deadly spree, is one in a series that organizer hopes will mobilize a grass-roots effort to attack the problem.

Concern written on their faces, more than two dozen parents, teachers, police officers, ministers and social workers gathered at a Best Western motel Sunday to share their fears about a recent surge in gang and youth violence in Orange County.

“I’ve got to find some way to help,” said Rebecca J. Andrade, who teaches the fifth grade in Santa Ana. “I see what the children are going through these days. . . . I don’t think people realize how out of hand violence is. . . . It’s really scary. . . . I decided I have to do something. “

Karen Lott, who organized Sunday’s forum through her group, Action Coalition on Teen Terrorism, said residents will be motivated to act “once we can get people to understand that it can happen to them.”

For too long, Lott added, “the victims have (been) invisible.”

Sunday’s forum was one in a series that Lott, whose teen-age son was wounded in a drive-by shooting last year in Lake Forest, has organized in hopes of mobilizing a grass-roots effort to attack the problem of gangs and youth violence.

The meeting was held in the wake of one of the most violent periods in Orange County’s history, with 11 people slain in the past 10 days, most of them gang-related, police said. During this same period, police in Garden Grove and Anaheim conducted unrelated gang sweeps that netted 60 arrests.

By last month, Orange County law enforcement authorities reported a record yearly total of more than 50 gang-related deaths, up from 43 deaths for the same period in 1992.

Lott, a 45-year-old real estate agent, has been campaigning for nearly a year against gangs and violence in schools. Along with her husband and son, Lott has organized forums and urged high school students to wear green ribbons as a symbol of their commitment to the issue.

“We need to teach children to be responsible for their own actions,” she said.

Among the group’s goals, she said, was to lower from 16 to 13 the age at which juveniles can be tried as adults for serious crimes; making parents more liable for their children’s crimes and publishing the names of children charged with serious crimes.

Looking out into the audience from around the county Sunday, Lott asked people to “erase the (boundary) lines of our communities . . . so we can be able to look to each other for support.”

Earlier this month, in a crime that shocked South County, 17-year-old Steve Woods was critically injured when an attacker speared him in the head with a paint roller handle in San Clemente, leaving him in a coma.

Woods and several friends were attacked in Calafia Beach County Park by at least six young men, some of whom identified themselves to sheriff’s deputies as members or associates of a San Clemente gang.

At the forum Sunday, numerous speakers said the Oct. 15 attack on Woods and other recent crimes convinced them that youth violence is now widespread and no longer limited to certain neighborhoods.

Eve A. Johnson, a mother of five, said that until the Woods incident, living in Mission Viejo was like being “in a glass bubble” when it came to gangs and violence.

Lassie Olin, a homemaker from Lake Forest, said she was puzzled by the phenomenon of children from affluent, two-parent homes with a stay-at-home mother who acted and dressed like “gang wanna-bes.”

“We’re supposed to be in conservative Lake Forest,” she said.

When the news of the Woods attack broke and rumors about gangs and violence swirled, said Stacey Nunz, a concerned parent from Mission Viejo, “we felt we were isolated.”

Police officials in the audience echoed some of the same concerns as parents.

“We in law enforcement don’t have all the answers,” said Sgt. Stan Jacquot, of the Sheriff’s Department’s Gang Enforcement Team.

“It’s not a racial issue,” Jacquot said. “Kids from all races are involved. . . . The problem is not gangs,” he said. “It’s violence . . . (and) it’s not just the gangs we’re dealing with,” he said. “It’s society in general.”

In the wake of the Woods attack, Lott went to Children’s Hospital at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo to be with Woods’ mother. She later organized a peace march Oct. 17 in Mission Viejo, which attracted about three dozen people.

Lott’s 17-year-old son, Philip, was critically injured in a 1992 drive-by shooting near El Toro High School, after an altercation over a Halloween party. He was hit by four bullets, suffering wounds to both legs and his stomach. After two surgeries, Philip said he still suffers from nerve damage to his left leg.

Two of the four teen-agers accused of the shooting pleaded guilty to assault with a deadly weapon and are now serving terms at the California Youth Authority. The other two--including a longtime friend of Philip Lott with whom he had a falling out--face trial today on charges of attempted murder, Karen Lott told the audience.

Lott said she first acted “out of all the rage and anger I felt over what happened to Philip,” channeling the anger she felt toward the “two violent teen-aged terrorists who hurt my son.”

The only discordant note of the afternoon came when Steve Woods’ sister, Shellie, appeared briefly, to announce a demonstration called for Tuesday morning across the street from San Clemente High School. Woods said that some of the flyers distributed for the demonstration wrongly stated that it was sponsored by Lott’s organization.