Hollywood Rattled by Shootouts; Police Kill 2 : Violence: Chaotic back-to-back gunfights leave two LAPD officers wounded and neighborhood residents shaken.

Hollywood was rattled by gunfire as Los Angeles police killed two armed men--including one who had two shootouts with officers, wounding two of them and pockmarking parked cars with buckshot.

The shooting erupted just after 9:30 p.m. Saturday in a battered neighborhood of fenced-in apartment complexes a few blocks south of Sunset Boulevard.

As coroner’s officials removed one suspect’s body Sunday morning, neighbors clustered around the scene and exchanged news in Spanish. Gossiping and gaping, they examined a splotch of dried blood marked by a Budweiser bottle.

One man, who gave his name only as Pedro, carefully picked a shotgun pellet out of the wooden siding on a light-blue Ford Ranger pickup. “I’m going to take home some evidence,” he said with delight.

“There’s gunfire around here every weekend. Fridays and Saturdays are very popular for that,” Pedro said. “But this, how can I put it, broke a record.”

The shooting began when Officers Jaime Elias, 31, and Marvin Kenecht, 39, were cruising Gordon Street looking for those involved in an earlier assault. As they drove down the tree-lined street, they spotted an unidentified man with a gun, said Officer Mike Schwehr, an LAPD spokesman.

The partners stopped to investigate, and the man allegedly pointed his gun at Elias. Still seated in his marked police sedan, Elias fired two rounds, Schwehr said. The suspect collapsed on the ground. As Elias opened his car door to investigate, another man--who had been standing in the shadows of a nearby driveway--opened fire with a shotgun, Schwehr said.

The surprise blast wounded Elias in the leg and buttocks and shattered the police car’s rear passenger window. Several dozen pellets sprayed across the street and peppered two parked cars, nicking the paint on a brown Datsun and scarring the Ranger’s siding.

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Recovering in his hospital room Sunday afternoon, Elias said he remembered seeing the first suspect with a gun--but after that, the details got fuzzy. “Everything just happened so fast,” he said. “As soon as I got out of the car, I got hit. I don’t even remember what else happened.”

Gordon Street resident Jim Dunsford, 55, heard the shots as he was watching television and dashed outside, where he saw the dead suspect crumpled on the ground.

“It was just another quiet night until all the shots started,” Dunsford said.

“It wasn’t just a few shots,” he added. “It was a lot.”

And that was just the beginning.

When backup officers tried to approach the injured Elias, the second suspect, identified only as John Doe 2, began shooting. Several officers returned fire. John Doe 2 fled on foot, dripping blood.

The neighborhood got chaotic.

“Police were coming from that side and this side,” Dunsford recalled. “They were shining lights all over.”

A SWAT team, helicopters and police dogs searched the neighborhood and found John Doe 2 just a block away on a Tamarind Avenue rooftop. Surrounded by police, the suspect fired a single shot, wounding 10-year LAPD veteran John Kent in the neck and arm. Officers immediately returned fire, killing the suspect with a flurry of bullets, Schwehr said.

Kent was treated at a local hospital and released.

The bloody evening alarmed some Hollywood residents, including Marta Estrada, who walked to North Gordon Avenue from her home several blocks away to check out the scene Sunday.

“Of course we’re scared,” she said. “We shut ourselves up in the house every night because we hear about all the ugly things happening on the streets.”

Other residents, however, shrugged off the violence. In his neighborhood, where kids play in the shade of carports and broken furniture litters the sidewalk, a man who gave his name as Jorge said a periodic gunfight “is just something that’s going to happen.”

The block has its share of violence and gang activity, Elias agreed. But then again, he added, sounding weary, “it’s hard to go somewhere that doesn’t.”