Charges Filed in School Gun Case : Courts: Prosecutors say woman allowed her daughter, 9, access to the weapon. The girl fired it on campus, nearly wounding a child.

In the first local case of its kind, a woman in Panorama City was charged Wednesday with allowing her 9-year-old daughter access to a gun, which the girl fired last month on her elementary school’s playground.

Gloriette Littlejohn, 37, is accused of violating the state’s 1991 Children’s Firearm Accident Prevention Act by leaving the weapon in a drawer that City Atty. James Hahn said was “readily accessible to the youngster.”

The girl took the gun to Plummer Elementary School on May 4 and fired it in front of a 7-year-old boy. Although the girl had removed the loaded magazine from the .40-caliber Glock semiautomatic pistol, one bullet remained in the chamber, authorities said. It discharged when she pulled the trigger and passed through the fabric of the boy’s jacket sleeve, they said. No one was injured.

The girl allegedly dropped the pistol and ran crying from the scene. School officials recovered the gun, its magazine loaded with 10 bullets, and one spent shell casing, the city attorney’s office said.

She told authorities she had found the pistol in a drawer in her mother’s bedroom and put it in her backpack as protection against gang members who had been threatening her.

Littlejohn also was charged with receiving stolen property because the gun was reported stolen in February from a Venice home, authorities said. The theft remains under investigation.

She could not be reached for comment.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials will recommend that the fourth-grader be expelled at the Board of Education’s June 19 meeting, said district spokesman Bill Rivera.

Since the district adopted its 1993 “zero tolerance policy” toward weapons, enabling it to expel any child who brings a gun onto a school campus, 409 students have been removed from Los Angeles public schools for violating the rule, Rivera said.