Girl’s Death Torments Her Father : Tragedy: He says he struck her as discipline, but not hard. She ran away and, two days later, gang gunfire killed her.

The father of 13-year-old Wendy Macias solemnly recounted Tuesday the events that led to his daughter running away from home and ultimately getting shot and killed by stray gunfire in South-Central Los Angeles.

In the small South-Central home that Wendy shared with her parents and five brothers and sisters, Carlo Macias, 43, recalled how Wendy slipped out of the house Sunday night to meet her boyfriend at Exposition Park. Macias caught them. He said he reprimanded Wendy and slapped her on the shoulder.

Wendy was upset and ran away from home. Two days later she was dead, caught in the cross-fire of a South-Central gang shooting as she was waiting for her mother to bring her home.

Macias said he is tormented by his daughter’s death, but also mystified why she ran away. He did not hit his daughter hard, he said, and insisted that he would never hurt any of his children.

After he brought his daughter home from the park, he said, Wendy told her 12-year-old sister, Monique, that she was going to run away. She was afraid her mother would be angry with her.

She spent the night with an aunt, a few of her friends said. The next day Wendy, who had been a candidate for the Explorer Scout program in the Los Angeles Police Department’s Newton Division, called officers. They took her to a foster home for runaways in the Athens district of South-Central, authorities said. Macias said a police officer contacted him, letting him know that Wendy was safe, but that because it was a weekend, it would take them a while to get her back home.

Authorities say Wendy left the home voluntarily Sunday night and called home from a pay phone at the corner of 106th Street and Normandie Avenue.

“She talked to Monique and said, ‘Tell Mamma to pick me up,’ ” Macias said. She gave Monique the location, but Monique had the wrong address, he said. Monique told her mother, Maria, to go to 160th Street and Normandie Avenue, instead of 106th.

Wendy’s mother began searching for her--more than 50 blocks south of the phone booth. Wendy was talking on the phone to a friend, while waiting for her mother, when she was struck by a bullet intended for a gang member, police said.

When Maria Macias could not find her daughter, she headed home on Normandie and saw a large group of law enforcement officers gathered at 106th Street, Macias said.

The mother asked a deputy if they had seen Wendy and gave a description of what she had been wearing, Macias said. The deputy told her that someone fitting that description had been shot and taken to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center.

When Maria arrived at the emergency room, doctors told her that Wendy was dead.

“She was a good daughter,” Macias said. “She wanted to be a cop or join the Marines.”

While Wendy’s funeral has not been scheduled, family and friends held a carwash to raise money for burial expenses. At an auto shop on the corner of 50th and Main Streets, family and friends scrubbed and cleaned cars all day Tuesday.

“Even if I didn’t have a car, I would give,” said Joyce Nelson, 38, of Los Angeles, who had heard about the fund-raiser. “I couldn’t believe that this had happened so I came to give some money.”

The Newton Division has established a memorial fund to help defray funeral expenses, police said.

Detectives in the Sheriff’s Department continue the search for the gunman who killed Wendy.