Fatal Shooting of Boy, 12, Shocks Community : Violence: As a family mourns victim who was a bystander during gang gunfire, outraged Altadena residents talk of taking back their neighborhoods.

Emerging into the fluorescent glare of a hospital corridor Wednesday, Minnie Richards’ face was streaked with tears. Her daughter and son huddled close, their eyes rimmed in red.

A day after her son Justin was shot for no reason, there was not much to say.

“He’s dead,” Richards said. “My son just died because someone was swinging a gun around.”

Apparently unreconciled to the fact of her 12-year-old boy’s death Wednesday at Huntington Memorial Hospital, she added: “He is a good son. . . . He loves baseball.”

The mother’s suffering seemed to be shared by much of the community of Altadena, where Justin Richards was gunned down Tuesday, just moments after he stepped off the bus that took him from school.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies already had arrested a reputed gang member, Errol Smith, 23, on suspicion of murder Wednesday. They said Justin was an innocent bystander in what appeared to be a confrontation between rival gangs, which began with arguing, then rock-throwing and finally gunfire.

The news was just the most recent outrage in a community where gang members have become so brazen that they marched, en masse, up west Altadena’s main street last weekend. Many residents saw that act by as many as 80 members of one gang as an attempt to provoke a rival group.

“They should just take all of these guys out in the desert and let them shoot each other and leave the kids out of it!” one disgusted man said as he left an Altadena supermarket Wednesday.

Amid the abundant displays of anger, there remained considerable hope. People were talking about the problems, but their proposed solutions were as many as the faces in the multiethnic community nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Old men talked about discipline and the value of a “good whippin.’ ” A young professional supported the law recently passed in Pasadena to restrict ammunition sales, but said gun control should go much further. An engineer suggested that the community needs to close some of a plethora of liquor stores, such as the one outside of which the shooting occurred.

But most people talked about the need to solve the problems of violence within families and through community action.

“We just have to do a better job of being parents and teachers,” said Ken Lovell, an engineer who has lived in Altadena for more than 20 years. “We have to teach our kids the difference between right and wrong.”

Two retirees out for their daily walk near Altadena Drive and Lincoln Avenue, where the shooting occurred, said they see a shocking lack of discipline in the teen-agers who mill about the area on many evenings after school.

“They have got to give families more control and stop all this talk about child abuse,” said one of the men, Melvin Jones, 65. “In my day, I grew up in Watts and if you did anything wrong they would run your butt into the ground. That worked.”

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Aretha Taylor formed the Single Parent Organization locally five years ago in recognition of the need for families to take control. “Crime is getting younger and younger,” Taylor said. “They can form every coalition in the world, but no one is going to solve this problem but parents.”

Anita Martin is focusing on a wider audience--using intensive organization and persistence to reform her neighborhood around Royce Street in Altadena.

“This was the worst street around when we moved here,” said Martin, an activist whose husband, Walter, is president of the Altadena Town Council. “We went to talk to the gang members and told them we weren’t going to allow it.

“We introduced ourselves to the neighbors and to the sheriff’s deputies,” she continued. “We told them where we lived, and we told them what was needed. We started a Neighborhood Watch. We got a ‘phone tree’ going because we learned there is more response if there is more than one phone call (to sheriff’s deputies). We made maps so the deputies could find all our homes. And we got to know them so they knew they could trust us when they came out here.”

Martin said neighborhood crime has decreased markedly and that the crack houses are gone. Residents of the Pasadena community of Washington Park used similar tactics to reduce crime in their community from about 60 incidents a month to almost none, residents there said.

The challenge now for community activists in Altadena is to keep up the pressure after the initial shock and mourning has faded, said Theodore H. Jones of Pasadena’s Coalition for a Nonviolent City. He said community action was brisk for more than a year after the 1993 Halloween slaying of three boys, but then began to taper off.

“The numbers began falling off because we found that there were fewer and fewer people willing to roll up their sleeves,” Jones said. “They wanted action, but they wanted that action to be carried by someone else.”

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The problem is being faced by neighborhood reformers around the country, said Milton R. Dohoney, president of Neighborhoods USA, a national organization that encourages residents to take charge of their own communities.

“The unfortunate reality is, in most situations, we’re talking about moving a problem somewhere else,” Dohoney said. “You may clear your block or your neighborhood, but the problem with gangs and drugs is so pervasive.

“The hope,” he added, “is that more communities will become mobilized before they have a drive-by shooting or an innocent child is killed, or they allow drugs to become so entrenched in their communities that it’s a second economy.”

No one seems to know the cause of Tuesday’s shooting. Some teen-agers in one car were hassling a young couple in another car, and the fight quickly escalated into rock-throwing in the parking lot of a florist shop, witnesses said.

Deputies said Smith, 23, fired a gun that sent the crowd scattering. None of the apparent targets was hit. But Justin, across the street just at the door of the liquor store, was struck once in the forehead by a stray bullet.

Smith was picked up with a group of about eight witnesses at the crime scene, and deputies said he eventually admitted to them that he had fired the fatal shot. They said he then led them back to a house where he had hidden the weapon.

Children and teen-agers around the intersection had dropped to the ground with the pop of gunfire. And one of Richards’ classmates tugged at his hand when the shooting stopped, not initially realizing his friend had been mortally wounded, said a school official who heard the account.

On Wednesday, students and teachers at Marshall Fundamental Secondary School were grieving.

“He wasn’t a superstar student,” Principal Carrie Allen said. “But he had quite a bit of personality and spunk. He was as good as he was mischievous. When he came into a room, he really made his presence felt.”

I couldn’t sleep last night,” Allen added. “To have it actually be one of your students is just devastating. I know we love them all and care about them. I guess we just have to dig in and do more.”

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Killing Hits Home The killing of a 12- year- old boy by gang gunfire has outraged Altadena residents who have now vowed to stop neighborhood violence. An ambitious effort in neighboring Pasadena has mobilized community leaders.