Lynwood Market Shooting Tests Open-Mindedness of Community

Inside, grocer Michael Kim was struggling to keep his store open.

Outside the tiny Lynwood market--where a box of cookies led to the shooting of a 14-year-old--customers and neighbors were struggling Monday to keep their minds open.

The teen-ager was wounded after he allegedly stole the cookies and ran from the store Saturday afternoon. The shopkeeper said he fired when the boy seemed to reach menacingly for something in his waistband as a nearby friend drew a knife.

On Sunday, a threat against his life caused Kim to close early. He was bleary-eyed and nervous when he reopened Charles Market on Monday morning. Neighbors along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard were pondering what will happen next.

“There’s too much shooting, but you have to protect yourself,” said a resident of an apartment next door.

People should not be too quick to jump to conclusions, said Daniel Velez, a 13-year-old who described himself as a friend of both the wounded boy and the shopkeeper--and as an eyewitness to the end of Saturday’s drama.

“We don’t know the law. We can’t judge what happened,” Daniel said.

He was standing in front of the store when Kim raced up in his car with the wounded teen-ager inside. The grocer had loaded the boy into the auto and driven back to the market to call paramedics after the shooting three blocks away.

Daniel said he was watching as the grocer lay the boy in the store’s doorway, placing the youngster’s hands beneath his head as he called for help. A bullet wound was visible on the boy’s upper left chest, he said, but there was little bleeding.

The boy, unidentified by authorities because of his age, was known to Daniel as “Cuate”--Spanish slang for twin--because he has a twin brother. Daniel and the teen-ager sometimes sparred against each other at the Megaton boxing gym across the street from the market.

“He was trying to get out of gangs by boxing,” Daniel said of the youngster. “He is a pretty good guy.”

But Kim is “a pretty nice guy” too, Daniel quickly added. “When we don’t have enough money to pay for it, he gives cookies and Gatorade to us.

“He probably got nervous. You know how people can act when they get nervous.”

A few steps away, Robert Hinojos, 31, was sipping on a soft drink he had purchased in Kim’s store. He agreed that the shopkeeper seemed nervous at the time of the shooting. Hinojos said he knows because he was at Norton Avenue and Long Beach Boulevard when the shooting occurred as the boy and a friend ran by.

“I saw a car turn real quick and then he put the gun out and said: ‘Hold it!’ ” Hinojos recalled Monday. “He pulled out a gun and they turned and ran. . . . I heard five or six shots. The little kids were trying to run for their lives after they saw his gun.”

But the tattooed, soft-spoken Hinojos--who described himself as a former gang member--disputed Kim’s contention that one of the boys had a knife. “It was no self defense. He should have tried to chase them.”

Others in Lynwood were willing to give Kim the benefit of a doubt, however.

“You have to protect yourself. As long as he’s protecting his place, it’s all right to shoot,” said Maria Ochoa, 37, who has lived nearby for seven years.

“The guy who used to own the store shot into the air when he was robbed,” she said.

(California law says any person can take the life of someone who is trying to commit murder or any other felony, including breaking into a home or trying to commit “great bodily harm.” However, in each of these situations a citizen must also have what the law calls “a sufficiency of fear” that his life is in danger--not simply that his property will be damaged. He can take action if the circumstances are dangerous enough “to excite the fears of a reasonable person.”)

Kim, who purchased the market 11 months ago, said Monday he was “too tired” to comment on the shooting after staying up all night worrying about the threat.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies--who arrested the wounded teen-ager on a charge of felony strong-armed robbery--have not decided whether they will recommend that Kim be charged.

But Kim complained that the news media has blown the shooting out of proportion by injecting his ethnicity into the incident.

“That they’re making such a big thing about the fact that I’m a Korean, I consider an extreme case of racial discrimination against Koreans,” Kim said.

Others in Los Angeles’ large Korean-American community agreed with him Monday. Many of them are still angry over the news coverage of the 1991 killing of 15-year-old African American Latasha Harlins by Korean American grocer Soon Ja Du.

“This case should be seen as a simple dispute between a merchant and a customer where a shoplifting occurred” and the incident escalated, said Edward Chang, an assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC Riverside and a longtime leader in Los Angeles’ Koreatown.

Lynwood officials sought Monday to downplay any racial overtones to the shooting.

However, a race relations task force is being reactivated as a result of the incident.