San Gabriel Valley : Prosecutors Seek to Try Boy in School Shooting as an Adult

The district attorney’s office said Wednesday that it will seek to try a 14-year-old boy as an adult on two counts of attempted murder.

Police arrested the boy and two of his friends Saturday after an investigation into a Friday night shooting at South Pasadena High School that injured two people.

Several shots were fired from the second floor of a house 200 to 300 yards away into a crowd of about 150 spectators at a girls’ “powder puff” football game, police said.

Because of the boys’ distance from the football field, it is unclear whether they were trying injure someone, said South Pasadena Police Chief Tom Mahoney, who called the act “a conspiracy to commit stupidity.”

“It was pure chance that they hit anyone at all,” he said. The victims, a 16-year-old girl shot in the ankle and a 48-year-old man wounded in his side, were “both fine,” Mahoney said.

While the investigation continued Wednesday, two of the boys were arraigned in Pasadena Juvenile Court, said Sandi Gibbons, public information officer for the district attorney’s office. The third boy was released to the custody of his parents.

All three are freshmen; two attend South Pasadena High School and one is enrolled in San Marino High School, police said.

The district attorney’s office is seeking to try one of the boys as an adult “because of the gravity of his crimes,” Gibbons said. Along with the attempted murder charges, the boy faces two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. Detainment hearings for the two boys are set for Tuesday.

The other boy will return to Juvenile Court in Pasadena on March 28. He is charged with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, one count of accessory and one count of possession of a deadly weapon, Gibbons said.