Child Dies Playing With Gun

Eleven-year old Juian Coronel loved to play baseball. He loved to toss footballs. He loved to swoop his hair into a Jim Carrey pompadour and scamper through the house yelling lines from the “Ace Ventura” movies.

But just after midnight Friday, he discovered a game that was a lot less wholesome--and it ended in tragedy.

Juian and his younger brother were playing with their stepfather’s two guns when one, a .357 magnum, went off in an apparent accident, Los Angeles Police Officer Helen Lloyd said. Juian was struck fatally in the head. His cousin rushed in seconds later and found him lying face down on his bed, the gun in his right hand, blood soaking into the sheets.

Police arrested the dead child’s stepfather, Jose Echeverria, 42, a security guard, and mother, Marlen Pineda, 30, and booked both on suspicion of criminal storage of a weapon, said Officer Don Cox, an LAPD spokesman. Each was being held on $15,000 bail, Cox said.

After the incident, police said, Juian’s three siblings--including the 10-year-old brother who was playing with him just before his death--were placed in the custody of the county Department of Children’s Services.

The state penal code permits prosecution of adult gun owners if children get a hold of their weapons and then brandish, exhibit or fire them in public.

However, the Los Angeles city attorney has rarely pressed such charges. In fact, the city’s first prosecution under the law came last summer, when a Panorama City mother was sentenced to 35 days of community service after her 9-year-old daughter took a pistol to school and fired a shot that narrowly missed a classmate.

Lloyd said the city attorney and detectives would evaluate the still-murky circumstances surrounding Juian’s death and decide whether to press charges.

It was unclear from police statements Saturday exactly how Juian died. But Juian’s cousin, Hector Lemus, said he believed Juian had accidentally shot himself while his brother was out of the room.

Hector, a high school junior, said he tried to use first aid techniques to revive his cousin. But he found no pulse and could not detect breathing--and as blood soaked through the bedsheets around Juian’s head, he had to give up.

Squinting in the sweaty noon sun, Hector said he could not imagine why Juian had decided to play with such a deadly toy. Only a few hours before, he said, Juian had been happily batting around a soccer ball and talking about going to the movies.

“I’m very sad,” Hector said. “We used to have fun together.”

Hector said he knew of one handgun in the house, which he believed was stored unloaded, tucked away on the top shelf of a closet. “I don’t know how [Juian and his brother] got a hold of it,” he said.

Neighbors along West Gage Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles wondered as well.

Juian and his large extended family--four siblings and several cousins--were considered good kids. Not gang-bangers. Not troublemakers. Not daredevils.

“You never saw them on the street with the other kids,” said Ada Beard, who lives across the street. “They were kind of home-body kids, I would say.”

In fact, Beard said, Juian and his siblings used to ride their bikes just half a block down the sidewalk before turning home.

And Juian, a thin-faced kid who dreamed of becoming a firefighter or police officer, made a point of being friendly to his neighbors. He always paused to grin hello to the retiree next door, Gardner Davis. “That touched me,” Davis said. “He was so warm and friendly and giving. You just don’t meet neighbors like that anymore.”

Beard did not have to reach far to pluck a lesson out of the tragedy.

“You can never impress on peoples’ minds enough that those [guns] should be locked up,” she said. “No matter how many times you tell the children not to play with them, the kids get curious. They see on TV how one minute you’re dead and the next minute you’re not, and they can’t separate fiction from reality.”

Gazing out from her front porch to the patch of grass where Juian used to practice baseball and football, Beard added: “That’s one more child I won’t see when I look out my window at the children playing.”

Times staff writer Patrick McDonnell contributed to this story.