Gang Patrol Faces Bumpy Night : Crime: The Special Problems Unit goes to work in West Valley.

The first shot shattered the rear window and 18-year-old Robinson Mata instinctively ducked left.

One of the following shots caught the lower left side of his cheek, ripping skin. “It tore a kind of a ditch along the lower side of his jaw,” an emergency room nurse said later.

Mata would live. But the shooting early Monday was troubling confirmation of growing gang violence in the West San Fernando Valley. It was only the second night of duty for the Special Problems Unit, the Los Angeles Police Department team assigned to clean up the area. And already, this.

“It gets frustrating,” said Sgt. Isidore Gutierrez, leader of the detail. “Ups and downs. Ups and downs.”

The long night would embody those words--and the mission of the unit itself. Mata lived, but his attackers escaped. Officers confiscated a rifle, but learned that the young man toting it was only 13. And though the night had been generally slow, it exploded with activity at about 1 a.m., when Mata heard the first shot.

The slug--shot from a .45-caliber semiautomatic--had entered Mata’s cheek and exited through his chin. And as the gunfire continued, Mata, bleeding--his girlfriend screaming from the passenger seat--floored the gas pedal of his Honda Civic, accelerating through a narrow parking lot and skidding to a stop at a dead-end.

Without turning off the engine, the couple leaped out, ran to a friend’s place and banged on the door. The attackers--a group of teen-age boys and girls in a minivan--didn’t follow.

Minutes later, Officer Jim LaForce stood in the parking lot of the Canoga Park apartment complex, gripping his shotgun.

“They probably passed right by us when we were going to the call,” he said of the attackers. “I bet they were watching us.”

An officer knelt and extracted a slug from the back of the passenger seat where Mata’s girlfriend, Jane Ocon, had been sitting.

“Another eighteenth of an inch, and this bullet would have been buried in her abdomen,” LaForce said, holding the round--one of seven fired--close to his eye, like a jeweler appraising a gem.

The stepped-up enforcement has been ordered to stem the growing number of Valley gang killings--at least 30 so far this year. The special unit--which began work last weekend--adds at least six extra officers on the street in three cars, increasing to 20 the number of officers working nights in the West Valley. They patrol 55 square miles, home to about 300,000 residents. The unit will be in force indefinitely, said Capt. Val Paniccia, commanding officer at the station.

The special unit will patrol, in convoy, West Valley neighborhoods where gangs such as the Reseda South Siders, the Canoga Park Alabama and the Asian Bad Boys stake claims. The action follows similar deployment in the East Valley’s Foothill Division, as well as the Northeast Division, where 3-year-old Stephanie Kuhen was killed.

“We beefed up Foothill, and the gangs are coming down here now,” Gutierrez said. “These gang members need to know it won’t be any easier for them down here.”

It’s certainly not any easier for the residents.

“We didn’t know this was gang territory when we moved here,” said an angry Michael Antes, who heard the shooting from his apartment at Canyon Court. “This is just ridiculous. People are scared.”

Said another: “Man, I’m just not going out anymore.”

By now, Mata had been whisked by ambulance to the hospital, and the officers got down to business, knocking on doors, talking to neighbors, looking for shell casings and slugs. They listened as Jane recounted her story, told between sobs as she clung to her mother’s side.

No, she told police, Robinson was not a gang member. They have dated for four months.

“He is supposed to start college tomorrow [Monday] at Dominguez Hills,” she said, referring to the Cal State campus in Carson. “He never said anything about a gang. We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

Mata would say later that he got a bad feeling when the van pulled up next to him at the intersection of Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Victory Boulevard in Canoga Park. He was taking Jane home after a date.

“Where are you from?” asked a passenger in the van.

“I’m not from anywhere,” Mata said.

The light turned green. Mata sped off. The van followed and he became the West Valley’s fourth drive-by shooting victim in less than 10 days.

Two hours later, he was lying in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in gauze, his blood-soaked shirt stuffed into a paper bag next to him.

“I just want to say, they don’t have any right to take people’s lives away,” he said. “I just told him, ‘I’m not from anywhere.’ But he followed me. I guess this can happen anywhere.”

The West Valley’s Special Problems Unit went on its maiden patrol Saturday night, which had been unusually quiet. As they hit the streets Sunday night, police speculated with some optimism that news of the sweep had persuaded gang members to stay home.

But on Sunday night, the action started early. At about 8:15 p.m. on Darby Avenue, where the South Siders gather, a group of youths waited in a dark parking lot south of Vanowen Street.

They lined up as six officers searched them for weapons.

“Take a look at this, Sarge,” LaForce said to Gutierrez, holding out a dirk with a 3 1/2-inch blade taken from Nasim Karim, 18, an Afghan national who said he had been a South Sider for about 11 months.

Because Karim had no record, officers gave him a warning and returned the knife.

“It’s the same spiel I gave you last night,” Officer Steve Timbol told the group. “There’s a crack-down on gang activity. That means any little violation, anything we find, we’re going to bring you in. If I really wanted, I could get all of you for trespassing.”

Although the special problems detail targets gangs, they respond to any call for help. At about 10 p.m., after cruising through back alleys and empty parking lots in Canoga Park, officers spotted a man sprinting across Topanga Canyon Boulevard carrying a backpack.

The officers chased the man, who later admitted stealing the pack from a man who he said had annoyed him by drinking from his pitcher of beer in a bar without his permission. He was charged with attempted robbery.

About 30 minutes later, at Vanowen Street and Tampa Avenue, two youths started running after a patrol car passed them. One was carrying a rifle.

Police arrested a 13-year-old youth nicknamed Evil. He sat with his hands cuffed behind him on a bench in an aqua-blue holding room of the West Valley station. It was his first arrest, he said. He said he didn’t know that his friend--who got away--was carrying a gun, a .22 caliber rifle.

“When he saw the cops, he started running, and he gave me the gun,” Evil said, softly tapping his tennis shoes on the ground.

Officer Brian Koren tried talking to him.

“My brother’s in it,” Evil said, answering why he is a South Sider. “This thing right now, I don’t really care, because I know I’m not guilty.”

Evil spent Sunday night in the juvenile detention center at Sylmar, where he remained in custody late Monday.

Koren walked out of the boy’s earshot and shook his head: Only 13, he said, and maybe too far gone.