Ire Over Shots That Missed : Weapons: An officer hunting a suspect fired twice after mistaking a 12-year-old’s toy gun for the real thing. The Carson boy’s lawyer is outraged.

Freddy Palacio has always liked apricots.

Now he has the best of reasons.

An apricot tree was all that stood between the 12-year-old Carson 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.

One bullet ricocheted off the tree. A second struck the stucco in the house next door. Freddy, his twin sister Christina and their friend Deirdre Brinlee, 11, who were playing in Deirdre’s front yard, froze.

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

The stage for the Memorial Day incident had been set a few blocks away when there was a shooting in Carson Park. Deputies were combing Freddy’s 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. The pilot radioed ground units and officers arrived in one minute.

“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. “The deputy fired two rounds from his service weapon, missing the suspect. The suspect dropped the gun and was arrested.”

The shots were fired by Frank Lobato, a seven-year deputy, Lanier said. Though Freddy was released into the custody of his parents after spending more than two hours in the back of a sheriff’s car, Lanier said the department will ask the district attorney’s office to bring charges against the boy for “brandishing a firearm against a peace officer.”

That has the family’s attorney fuming.

“This is a clear case of a violation of Freddy’s civil rights,” Fitzgerald said. “Even if he did point his toy gun at the helicopter, what right does that give a deputy to just start shooting?”

Freddy Palacio said he purchased his cap gun at a corner liquor store about two months ago and was just “goofing off” with it that day.

He said he has been having trouble sleeping since the incident.