Boy Arrested After Teen-Age Girl Slain in Thousand Oaks : Crime: The 16-year-old friend is held after Jacqueline Ann Reay, also 16, is shot in eye at point-blank range.

A 16-year-old girl was shot in the eye and killed Wednesday by a teen-age male friend in the kitchen of a Thousand Oaks condominium, authorities said.

Police said they did not know what prompted the boy to shoot Jacqueline Ann Reay of Thousand Oaks at point-blank range in the 3 p.m. incident. The girl was treated at the scene and transported to Los Robles Regional Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.

Witnesses said the boy, who was handcuffed at the scene and later arrested on suspicion of murder, insisted that the shooting was an accident. Police said the 16-year-old boy’s name was not released because he is a minor.

“When the police came and put him in handcuffs, you could tell he was scared,” said Mike Lowe, 15, who lives next door to the scene of the shooting. “He kept saying to the police, ‘It was an accident, I swear.’ ”

Friends said Reay was visiting the condominium in the 600 block of Avenida del Platino to spend time with two girls she met last summer.

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At the time of the shooting, Reay, the suspect and two other teen-agers were in the condo, police said. According to an acquaintance of the two who asked not to be named, the boy pulled out a gun and shot Reay at close range as she stood in the kitchen.

Ventura County sheriff’s deputies who were in the neighborhood on an unrelated drug investigation responded to a 911 call from the condo and found Reay gravely injured but still alive, authorities said.

“They tried to resuscitate her and then transported her to the hospital,” Sheriff’s Sgt. Bruce Hansen said. “She was just barely hanging on.”

Reay died at Los Robles at 3:30 p.m., Deputy Coroner Zelmira Isaac said. An autopsy was scheduled for today.

Deputies who arrived on the scene shortly after the shooting to beat her up.”

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Jacqueline Reay and the suspect lived in the Las Casitas neighborhood of Thousand Oaks, a group of 540 condominiums where police have regularly struggled with crime. But, in the past year, residents and city officials said the area was showing strong signs of improvement.

In March, police reported that crime in the seven-block neighborhood had dropped 30% from the previous year.

For Thousand Oaks, a city of 100,000 that boasts a low crime rate, Hansen said this type of shooting is “very uncommon.”

“We have some crime here,” Hansen said, “but rarely do we see a violent act like this one.”

Correspondent Tracy Wilson contributed to this story.