Playing a Dangerous Game : Safety: Mistaking a 12-year-old’s toy for a real gun, a deputy fired twice. He missed, but children’s real-looking weapons continue to pose unnerving problems.

Freddy Palacio has always liked apricots.

Now he has the best of reasons.

An apricot tree stood between the 12-year-old boy and a bullet fired by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who mistook Freddy’s $2 toy gun for a .22-caliber pistol.

“They’re supposed to protect us, not kill us,” Freddy’s father, Jose Palacio, said of the deputies.

The Memorial Day incident in Carson was the most recent in an unnerving series involving law enforcement officers and increasingly realistic-looking toy guns. The collision of play violence with real violence throughout the nation has prompted several major toy distributors, including Toys R Us, Kay-Bee and Wal-Mart, to halt sales of the phony weapons.

The stage for the Carson incident had been set a few blocks away, with a real shooting at Carson Park. Deputies were combing the neighborhood in search of a suspect. A sheriff’s helicopter was passing over Caroldale Avenue, searching for the suspect, when the pilot saw Freddy point the gun at him.

“He was just goofing around,” said Freddy’s brother, Richard, 24. “He had been playing with a friend and had just come home. He was walking down the street, pointing his cap gun at the trees, at the birds, planes in the sky. You know, just like kids do. When he saw the helicopter, he just pointed at it.”

The pilot radioed ground units that he had found a person matching the description of the suspect from the Carson Park shooting. Deputies arrived in one minute.

A sheriff’s spokesman defended the actions of Deputy Frank Lobat, a seven-year veteran of the department.

“The suspect began to turn toward the deputies that were arriving, with the gun still in his hand,” said Sgt. Noel Lanier, a spokesman at sheriff’s headquarters. Lobat “fired two rounds from his service weapon, missing the suspect. The suspect dropped the gun and was arrested.”

Freddy was released into the custody of his parents after spending more than two hours in the back of a sheriff’s car, but Lanier said the department will ask the district attorney’s office to bring charges against the boy for “brandishing a firearm at a peace officer.”

That has the family’s attorney fuming.

“If it wasn’t for that tree, you’d have two dead children on your hands, maybe three,” said attorney Lonnie Fitzgerald. “For them to pull up to a scene and start shooting into a bunch of kids is not good policy.”

Freddy Palacio admits he likes toy guns. Deputies confiscated the toy he carried that day, but he has many more. He likes the bang the caps make when the gun’s plastic hammer smacks down on them. And he likes to point the guns at whatever comes across his path, which is what he was doing Memorial Day afternoon, in friend Deirdre Brinlee’s front yard, just across the street from his home.

His twin sister Christina and Deirdre, 11, were in a porch swing while Freddy walked along the drive, aiming at objects around him. Every once in a while, he would shoot toward the two apricot trees that stood between him and the street. Then at the helicopter buzzing overhead.

Then the two shots whizzed toward him. Luckily for Freddy, the apricot tree took a real hit this time; the first bullet blasted a two-inch chunk out of the trunk. A second shot hit the house next door.

Freddy, a slender boy just over 5 feet tall, said he does not intend to play with his toy guns anymore. He said he’s having trouble sleeping at night and still feels afraid.

Still, he is one of the lucky ones. In 1983, in the Orange County community of Stanton, an officer, entering an apartment where a 5-year-old boy who had been left home alone, shot and killed the boy when he saw him in near-darkness holding what proved to be a toy gun.

In 1987, a 19-year-old Rancho Cucamonga man was shot and killed at night when a San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy mistakenly believed the man was using a real gun. The man was playing laser tag, which uses plastic pistols that project a light beam.

A 1992 federal regulation requires that toy guns carry markings such as brightly colored tips on the barrel to make them less threatening, but many law enforcement agencies say people who buy the guns simply paint over the tips to make the phony weapons look more real. Freddy’s gun had a painted tip, family members said.