Trying to Cope With Loss of Sister, Brother : Violence: The families try to care for three young children. The two victims were shot to death by a bystander after a minor traffic accident in Pomona.

The 5-year-old girl stops playing outside the Pomona apartment and sums up her loss as though she were impassively reciting the details of a dark fairy tale.

“Somebody killed my mama,” she says. “My mommy’s dead.”

Inside, the girl’s 18-month-old sister sobs and refuses to leave the arms of her grandmother.

The children’s mother, Jennifer Soto, 22, and her brother, Sergio Soto, 16, were victims of violent chance earlier this month. A minor traffic accident near their modest apartment turned into an argument--not with the other driver, but with an uninvolved bystander who happened to have a gun tucked in his waistband. Jennifer Soto’s two children and Sergio’s infant son escaped injury in the back seat of her car.

Now the grandmother, Virginia Soto, spends her days mourning and comforting her grandchildren. Candles adorned with the images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary burn in her apartment, a couple of miles from where her son and daughter lived.

She holds the sobbing grandchild. “She misses her mother,” Virginia Soto says in Spanish. “They were my only children. They were good children.”

The suspected killer--a 17-year-old youth believed to be a member of a Fresno-based Laotian street gang--has been arrested and charged with two counts of murder for the March 4 killings. He also is facing a count of attempted murder in the shooting of another passenger in the car, Angie Bays, Sergio’s girlfriend and the mother of little Sergio. Prosecutors are seeking to try the youth as an adult.

“This was nothing where the victims had done anything to aggravate the assault,” Pomona Police Detective Allen Maxwell said. “There’s always that high probability of a gun being used now. Things are being solved with the pull of a trigger.”

Police say the Sotos were not gang members and the shooting was not gang-related. It came on a day that started like any other for most of the residents on East Pasadena Street, a low-income, racially diverse neighborhood that is not known for violence.

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The Sotos’ neighbor, Khamonh Phrapakdy, was celebrating her 18th birthday with friends and relatives. About a dozen of the girl’s guests were inside her family’s apartment, across a walkway from the Sotos’ place. About the same number were out back, standing under a carport, watching meat cook on a barbecue while rain fell.

Shortly after 8 p.m., Jennifer Soto and her children climbed into her old blue Oldsmobile to drive her brother, his girlfriend and their baby to the in-laws for the evening.

The windows fogged up and the rain made it difficult to see. When Soto backed out, she grazed the truck of one of the party-goers. There was no damage and the owner of the truck was amiable.

But for reasons that remain unclear, two other guests--the alleged killer and a friend-- became verbally abusive, witnesses told police.

“The suspect said something. . . . Jennifer said, ‘What did you say?’ and her brother made some kind of statement like ‘What did you call my sister?’ and it escalated from there,” Maxwell said.

Witnesses told police the two women were trying to break up the confrontation when the suspect pulled a pistol out of his waistband and fired seven or eight shots. When the shooting stopped, Jennifer and Sergio Soto lay dead on the ground, and Bays was seriously wounded. The woman’s two girls, 5-year-old Alejandra and 18-month-old Jennifer, wailed. Somehow, 3-month-old Sergio Jr. still slept in the car, a witness said. The neighbors called 911 and tried to comfort the survivors.

“Angie was up on her knees and I held her,” said neighbor Nancy Edwards. “She said, ‘I don’t want to die.’ Jennifer Soto’s two daughters were up and hollering. (Alejandra) was saying, ‘The Chinese man shot my mom.’ It was like a tape recording. She was just repeating it.”

Phrapakdy said she hadn’t invited the suspect or most of the other boys who showed up at her birthday party.

“I guess they heard about it and just came over,” she said.

Family and friends said the brother and sister, both of whom had become parents as teen-agers, were working hard to improve their lives.

Soto met her companion, Mario Frausto, at 16, got pregnant and dropped out of high school. She later enrolled in adult school and was working toward a high school diploma and had a part-time job at an employment agency. Neighbors described her as a devoted mother.

Sergio never liked school, his mother said, and attended sporadically, if at all. He and his girlfriend were enrolled in the district’s independent study program until the birth of their son last December, when they dropped out.

“They just had a lot of complications in their lives,” said a teacher, who asked not to be identified. “They were thrust into an adult world so early.”

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Sergio dreamed of being a mechanic, his mother said. He made friends with the owner of a local repair shop, Manny’s Carburetors, where he would go whenever he could to work for a little money and some free training.

Frausto said he put pressure on Sergio to find full-time work to help pay the bills. The teen-ager had landed a job at a local fast-food restaurant, but was gunned down before his first day, his relatives said.

In the wake of the shootings, Frausto, who works as a handyman for a local thrift shop, spent a recent day cleaning out his Pasadena Street apartment, planning to move in with relatives in Riverside. Sergio’s girlfriend was to be released from the hospital this week. Her parents and infant son had been at the hospital every day to visit, Virginia Soto said.

The residents of the modest apartment building where the shooting occurred said they will never forget the gunfire of March 4, or the neighbors they lost.

“She was a mother. She was a wife and she’s gone,” one neighbor, Barbara Walker, said of Soto. “It’s so sad.”