Tests Fail to Show if Boy Pointed Gun : Shooting: Gunshot residue is found on hand and glove of Lincoln Heights teen-ager killed by officer. But whether youth was carrying a pistol when shot is unresolved.

Forensic tests made with the use of an electron microscope do not appear to resolve whether a 14-year-old boy was pointing a pistol at a police officer when the officer shot him to death July 29 in Lincoln Heights.

Scott Carrier, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, said Tuesday that the tests performed Aug. 11 on the body and clothing of Jose Antonio Gutierrez show that he either had fired a gun or had placed his hand near where a gun was fired.

But the tests do not show whether the gun was fired during the confrontation with the police officer or sometime before that, Carrier said.

“We do not have any time frame whatsoever,” the coroner’s spokesman said.

According to police, Officer Michael A. Falvo and two partners saw Gutierrez walking along Eastlake Avenue after they had received a report that several youths were passing around a handgun.

The officers said that as Falvo opened the door of his patrol car, Gutierrez raised a Tec-9 pistol and pointed it at Falvo, but did not shoot it. Falvo said that--lacking time to order the youth to stop--he fired six times, hitting Gutierrez four times.

Residents told a different story, saying Gutierrez had been handling a gun that night, but had tossed it over a fence as the police car arrived. The youth’s family contends that he was carrying a flashlight--not a gun--when the officer shot him.

News of the controversial shooting spread rapidly through the neighborhood, prompting two days of street unrest by rock- and bottle-throwing youths. A tactical alert quelled the disturbances, but the controversy has endured over whether the youth was armed and threatening the officers when he was shot.

Adding to the controversy has been the fact that Falvo, 39, was identified by the Christopher Commission as one of 44 officers with a record of using excessive force. Falvo has been assigned a desk job pending the outcome of a departmental investigation of the shooting.

Police said Gutierrez’s fully loaded pistol was found behind the fence, a few feet from where he fell. Whether Gutierrez tossed the gun behind the fence when police appeared, as witnesses say, or it fell there when he was shot, as police say, has not been determined. No identifiable fingerprints have been detected on the pistol, and a shell casing found nearby has yet to be tied to any firearm.

Carrier said three weeks ago that an autopsy had showed that Gutierrez was not shot directly in the back, as some Eastside activists and Antonio H. Rodriguez, the Gutierrez family attorney, have suggested. Instead, police investigators said, the autopsy indicates that Falvo’s first shot may have hit the youth in the side, spinning him around as subsequent shots struck him from behind.

Information in the autopsy report also contradicts assertions by the youth’s family that he was not a gang member. The Eastlake Boys gang is based in the neighborhood, and a glove found on Gutierrez’s left hand read “LAKE” in “cryptic gang writing,” according to the report.

Carrier said Tuesday that the microscopic tests “revealed several unique particles of gunshot residue on the left glove . . . and several consistent particles of gunshot residue on the right hand. . . . Therefore, the decedent discharged a firearm or had his hand otherwise in an environment of gunshot residue.”

Investigative sources close to the case said the residue--microscopic particles of material from the primer of a cartridge--had to have come from a gun Gutierrez fired or one that was fired very close to his hands. The sources said Falvo’s shots came from too far away to have deposited the residue on the boy’s hand and glove.

Lt. John Dunkin, an LAPD spokesman, said the coroner’s latest report “tends to support” the police version of what happened. “It’s another piece of the puzzle,” he said, without elaborating.

But Rodriguez, the Gutierrez family attorney, said the report does nothing to bolster the LAPD’s contentions that police shot Jose Gutierrez in self-defense.

“I really don’t think it shows anything that establishes whether he had a gun when he was shot and whether he pointed the gun at the officers,” Rodriguez said.

The attorney noted that although the report talks about a gunshot, “all the parties agree that he didn’t fire at the officers.” On the other hand, Rodriguez said, the report seems consistent with witnesses’ reports that if Gutierrez was handling a gun, he tossed it away as police arrived.

Rodriguez has filed a wrongful-death claim on behalf of the youth’s parents and said Tuesday that he will file a lawsuit today against the city of Los Angeles.