12-Year-Old Driver Dies in Crash During Joy Ride : Crime: A second boy, 13, is in serious condition. They were in his father’s car.

Two boys on a joy ride through Sunland flipped their car early Tuesday, killing the 12-year-old driver and seriously injuring his 13-year-old passenger, the son of a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who had taken his father’s car without permission, police said.

Michael Way of Sunland was pronounced dead at the scene, said Lt. Nils Linder of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

The 13-year-old boy, who was airlifted to Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles, was in surgery in serious condition Tuesday afternoon, said hospital spokeswoman Maria Iacobo, with a cut forehead and a fractured left wrist.

Police would not identify the child, saying they are investigating whether to file criminal charges against him. “Obviously, you have two male juveniles out in a vehicle, so that aspect is under investigation,” said Police Lt. John Dunkin.

The boy’s father, who works in the Lost Hills/Malibu sheriff’s station, was not working at the time of the crash, said Lost Hills Sheriff’s Lt. Jim Glazar.

About 2:15 a.m., the boys attracted the attention of two Foothill police patrol officers when they sped through an intersection at Foothill Boulevard and Langmuir Avenue and zoomed over a dip in the road, scraping the bottom of the car and spewing sparks.

The patrol car pursued the boys’ beige Ford Taurus west on Foothill Boulevard for about a minute but gave up the chase when they lost sight of the car and determined that the wet road made further pursuit unsafe.

Pamela Pitcher, a probationary officer, and Officer Lisa Gallegos, her partner, estimated that the boys were driving in excess of 80 m.p.h. The officers ended their pursuit on Sunland Boulevard near La Canada Place.

Soon after the car rounded a turn and pulled out of the officers’ sight, they saw sparks light up the night sky.

The car had apparently plowed head on into a power pole on Sunland Boulevard, rotated around the pole, striking a low cement-block wall, crashed through 60 feet of a chain-link fence and then careened off a parked pickup truck, landing upside down, said LAPD Lt. Charlie Kunz.

At a news conference at Parker Center on Monday, Deputy Los Angeles Police Chief Martin Pomeroy said the officers acted according to department regulations when they called off the chase in the name of public safety.

The driver of the car “should have understood that the officers were no longer in pursuit,” Pomeroy said.

Pomeroy said the officers could not tell during the chase that the occupants were children. But if they had, he said, that would not have changed the pursuit policy.

Times staff writer Hugo Martin contributed to this report.