Grocer Flees Threats a Day After Shooting : Violence: As officials try to reduce tensions, reputed gang members intimidate the man who wounded a youth suspected of shoplifting.

Lynwood officials and community leaders worked Sunday to defuse racial tensions sparked by a Korean American grocer’s shooting a day earlier of a 14-year-old Latino suspected of shoplifting a bag of cookies.

But the grocer wound up padlocking his market after reputed gang members threatened him with retaliation--right in front of a city councilman who was visiting the mom-and-pop store.

A frightened Michael Kim, owner of Charlie’s Market, fled the business with his wife early Sunday afternoon. “Somebody threatens . . . I’m going to close,” he said before pulling a metal grating across the front of the market on busy Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

Officials in the Southeast Los Angeles County city worried that the Saturday shooting--which left the 14-year-old in critical condition with a chest wound--might mark a new chapter in troubled relations between Korean American grocers and the often poor, minority communities they serve.

After the threats by gang members Sunday--brazenly repeated before reporters--Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. William Henderson said deputies would keep an eye on Kim’s market “as much as we can.”

Lynwood Councilman Armando Rea was in the grocery shortly after noon Sunday, discussing the incident with the Kims, when two reputed gang members entered and told the couple “they were next in line” and “an accident will happen to him or her within the immediate future,” Rea said.

One of the pair made a hand gesture simulating a gun, “obviously threatening and intimidating” the store owners, Rea said.

Sheriff’s records do not indicate whether the teen-ager shot Saturday was a gang member. Authorities said he was among five youths who entered the streetside grocery, three purchasing items--but the others leaving with the cookies.

Kim chased the pair in his car and caught up with them several blocks away on Long Beach Boulevard, according to the sheriff’s report.

When he confronted the youths, the grocer told deputies, one drew a knife and approached him. The other motioned as if he was pulling something from his waistband, Kim said.

The grocer said he shot the second youth with a .38-caliber handgun and then drove him back to the store to call for help.

The wounded youth, who was reported in critical condition Sunday at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, was booked at the hospital on a felony charge of strong-armed robbery, Henderson said.

In the wake of the shooting, Rea and others called for dialogue between Korean American merchants and the predominantly Latino and African American residents they serve in Lynwood, a city of nearly 62,000 near the intersection of the Long Beach and Century freeways.

“Right now is time for cool heads to prevail,” said Benjamin Miranda, executive director of Concerned Citizens of Lynwood, a community organization, who also visited the store Sunday.

Miranda faulted the youths for taking the cookies and Kim for “taking the law into his own hands,” rather than reporting the theft to sheriff’s deputies. “Both sides were wrong,” Miranda said.

The incident inevitably prompted some to draw parallels--and distinctions--with the March, 1991, killing of an African American, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins by a Korean American grocer in South-Central Los Angeles in a dispute over a bottle of orange juice.

Grocer Soon Ja Du was sentenced to probation after being found guilty of voluntary manslaughter in that case, which heightened tensions between African Americans and Korean Americans just months before the 1992 riots.

In the Lynwood shooting, the victim was Latino and authorities have taken no action against the 36-year-old Kim, though they seized his revolver and the videotape from the store’s security camera. An investigation is continuing, Henderson said.

One of the youths in Saturday’s incident admitted Sunday that he and his friends belong to a gang and that they did steal the cookies. But the youth, 16, disputed Kim’s version of the shooting, including whether the grocer acted in self-defense. “My homeboy didn’t have no knife,” he said, standing in a small parking area adjacent to the store.

Councilman Rea said the youths’ conduct was “totally unacceptable whether Hispanic, African American or Anglo. It should not be tolerated.”

He called for efforts to talk to gang members in the city and “put a break to this” and “bring some understanding to both sides of the community.”

Rea also called on Korean American store owners to improve relations with the community by hiring Latino and black youths.

There was a steady stream of customers into the store Sunday, some in their Easter clothes--and all aware of the shooting the day before.

George Lyles, an African American, praised the owners as good people who treated him with respect. “You did the right thing,” he told Kim.

Behind the counter, Kim’s wife, who did not want to give her first name, said the couple bought the market 11 months ago and have tried to treat “all my customers like my family.” She insisted that her husband had acted in self-defense. “They are gangsters. They had a knife,” she said.

Despite the encouragement of Lyles and others, she and her husband hastily closed the business little more than an hour later, after the threat of retaliation by the gang members.

Outside, the 16-year-old said the grocer had reason to be be fearful.

“Right now, he’s a target,” the youth said.