Is There Hope for an End to the Slaying of Innocents? : Violence: Last week alone, three bystanders were killed in Southland. Survivors and officials vainly seek answers.

You would hope that a devoted evangelist standing on the steps of her church would be safe.

You would hope that a seventh-grader getting off at his bus stop would have found a haven.

You would hope that a clerk inside the calm confines of a suburban grocery store would be out of harm’s way.

You would hope.

But all of those places last week became the sites of fatal shootings of innocent bystanders in Southern California. One second Justin Richards, 12, Rudy Ruiz, 27, and Kara Bynum-Buster, 28, were here, going about their business. The next, they were gone, claimed by stray gunfire, their fresh graves serving as sad symbols--if any more were needed--of our ailing culture.

Even in a region of the country inured to violence, three innocent people slain in a week’s time in seemingly safe places seems a little much. If fate followed rules, then surely the death of a 12-year-old boy at a school bus stop would be a violation.

“The hardest thing in the world is to raise a daughter for 28 years and then have her life snuffed out like this,” said Edward Bynum. His daughter, Kara, died instantly March 27 at a Watts church as she bent down to shield her 1-year-old niece from gunshots fired from blocks away. “So many innocent people dying all of a sudden, that’s what gets me.”

Law enforcement officials and other observers, while expressing sorrow for the victims and their anguished families, say that the deaths of such innocents are far from rare.

No one seems to tally such things, but some experts estimate that one in 10 gun-related homicides claims the life of an innocent bystander. If that is true, then in a country with an average of 37,000 gun-linked murders a year, that comes to 3,700 a year, 10 a day.

Of the 1,004 gang-related homicides that occurred in Los Angeles in 1989, 1990 and 1991, police say 425 involved innocent people, young and old inadvertently caught in cross-fires or the victims of mistaken identity.

“Our own secretary here in this office had her brother-in-law murdered because of mistaken identity,” said Los Angeles Police Cmdr. John White. “He was shot in the head because somebody thought he was somebody else.”

The latest incidents occurred in San Gabriel, Altadena and Watts, and none appear to have involved gang activity--which, authorities say, indicates just how much violence has seeped into our communities.

Justin, the 12-year-old, was shot by a man aiming at rock-throwing vandals.

Bynum-Buster, the evangelist, was shot by a man involved in an altercation in a nearby housing project.

Ruiz, the grocery clerk, was shot as he emerged from the health and beauty aisle of a Lucky store near San Marino and inadvertently stepped into a gun battle between a robber and a guard.

With their names now added, the long list of innocent Los Angeles-area residents numbs the senses:

Manuel Martinez Contreras, father of three, killed as he unloaded his car in Oxnard.

Jose Guadelupe Gutierrez, father of four, fatally struck moments after he led an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Ventura.

Maria Elena Corona, mother of children ages 2 and 4, slain as she sat in her car in traffic in Santa Ana.

Willie Nava, 14, shot once in the head as he stood alone on a Watts street corner.

Tiffany Dozier, 12, struck in the back as she waited outside the Boys and Girls Club in Pacoima for her mother to pick her up.

Elvira Arteaga, 64-year-old grandmother, who died in her son’s arms after being caught in a shootout between two passing cars as she stood in her Santa Ana driveway.

To say nothing of Stephen Coats and Edgar Evans, both 13, and Reggie Crawford, 14, who were killed in a case of mistaken identity on Halloween, 1993, in Pasadena while walking home from a party.

Or the homeless woman caught in a drug-related cross-fire March 25 as she sat in her tent in Downtown Los Angeles minding her own business.

Or the many tragically similar cases throughout Southern California and the nation.

“If this were a disease,” said Sandy Cooney, western regional director of Handgun Control Inc., the largest gun control organization in the country, “we would classify it . . . and would treat it as such.”

So cruelly senseless, such killings have a ripple effect on the lives of parents, spouses, children and other family members suddenly confronted with the death of a loved one who was in the wrong place at the worst time.

“These deaths,” said Billie P. Weiss, director of Los Angeles County’s injury and violence prevention program, “have changed the lives of the families of these victims forever.”

Six months after her brother, Lupe Gutierrez, was killed by a stray bullet, words still fail Maria Sepulveda of Ventura. In halting English, the 34-year-old mother of two apologizes for not being able to adequately describe what it was like to experience the death of her older brother, who had two girls, 5 and 17, and two boys, 16 and 18, all of whom now live with other family members. She remembered:

“A man came pounding on my door and say, ‘Somebody hit Lupe! Come quick!’

“My mother came running. She saw her son lying there. She cried.

“I yelled, ‘Call an ambulance!’

“But my brother, he just lay there. He don’t talk no more.”

Then came the aftermath, deciding which relatives should now become parents to Gutierrez’s children, and trying to answer the unanswerable for them: Why?

“The children lost everything,” said Gutierrez’s sister. “They lost their house. They don’t have parents anymore.

“Three years before this happen, their mother die of cancer. My brother, he try to raise them alone. The little girl, she cries a lot and she say, ‘Why this happen to me? I have no one now. Why God do this to me?’

“The youngest son, he saw Lupe on the ground. He tried to save him. He tried to help his daddy. But he couldn’t. He say, ‘I have to cry all night. If I don’t cry, I feel like I can’t go to sleep.’ He has nightmares.

“I don’t tell my son how his uncle died. He’s 7. He says, ‘Why, why he die? How?’ But I don’t tell him. I don’t know if I’m right, but I don’t want to talk to him about the violence in this world. It’s not right, what’s happening.”

When they talk of the causes for such heartbreak, law enforcement experts and sociologists resort to phrases that are in danger of becoming cliches: the disintegration of the family, declining moral values, a feeling of hopelessness among young people, abandonment of inner cities, violence-filled movies and television shows, the proliferation of guns, the lack of gun control, lax or absentee parenting . . . and on it goes.

Gun control advocates are convinced that restrictions on gun sales could go a long way toward solving the problem. The National Rifle Assn., which opposes most gun controls, emphasizes instilling values in young people and punishing law violators. Social scientists say any improvement must start in the home.

Others say the trend will not change until the public is sufficiently outraged.

“Society’s got to get fed up to the point where people say enough’s enough, and we’re not there yet,” said the LAPD’s White.

If enough has not been enough, some experts wonder, then when will it be?

“Maybe we have desensitized ourselves to the fact that people are being shot every day, and we can’t do that,” said Cooney, the gun-control advocate.

Perhaps more than anyone, the friends and families of these innocent victims wonder the same.

“After I saw Rudy die like that, one of the first things I thought about was how this just as easily could have happened to me,” said a co-worker of Rudy Ruiz, the clerk killed in the Lucky store last week. “This was a total shock. This is a nice area.

“I went home that day and told my wife I loved her and I told my kids I loved them, because I might not have the chance.”

For now, as one Los Angeles County deputy put it, it’s like this: “Some weekends we have six, seven homicides; some weekends we have one. Who knows why? If last week we had a lot of innocents killed . . . maybe next week we’ll have none.”

You would hope.