Friends Grieve for ‘Special’ Boy

About two dozen Inglewood second-graders got a hard lesson Wednesday. They had to puzzle over the death of one of their own, 7-year-old Evan Foster, who had been killed by a stray bullet in a city park.

The children at Frank D. Parent Elementary School talked about being sad and scared and about having nightmares. They also drew pictures that revealed how they felt.

One of Evan’s friends drew him as an angel in heaven with blue wings and wrote: “Evan rhymes with seven and he’s 7. He makes himself laugh so hard that he falls on the floor. I am very super sad he died.”

Children, teachers, family and friends grieved Wednesday for the Inglewood boy who was killed in the back seat of his mother’s car Monday night, shot just moments after registering for a Darby Park basketball league. He was struck in the head by an errant bullet fired from a gun that Inglewood police called a “high-powered assault-type weapon.”

Evan’s 10-month-old brother, Alec, was wounded in the attack, hit in the face by metal fragments. He was in stable condition Wednesday at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. A hospital spokeswoman, Tessie Cleveland, said the baby was nursing and “sleeping a lot.”

The bullets were intended for a man standing nearby in the parking lot. Inglewood police have said the shooter apparently believed that the man--whose identity has not been released--was a rival gang member; police said he is not.

The boy’s mother, 37-year-old Rhonda Foster, had frantically tried to maneuver her car out of the way of the gunshots. She was not hurt. Nor was the intended victim.

Plain to see Wednesday at an Inglewood garage were the bullet holes marking Foster’s 1985 Ford Thunderbird--on the right side of the windshield, the left front quarter panel and the hood.

The upholstery in the rear seat--where the brothers had been sitting, Alec in a car seat in the middle, Evan to his right--was torn, split at head level.

Police, emphasizing how many times the car was hit in mere moments, resumed their search Wednesday for the assailant and other suspects. It remains unclear how many men were with the shooter in the parking lot.

“Several people have called in and given us what we believe to be pretty good tips,” Inglewood police Sgt. Michael McBride said. “We’re pursuing those tips vigorously.”

In a statement issued Wednesday through the hospital, Foster and her husband, Ruett, called Evan an “awesome boy” and said: “We are so glad and thankful that he did not see the guns. He was talking to his mom in a happy mood and in mid-sentence was escorted by the angels to Jesus.”

The parents noted that Teena Collins, Evan’s second-grade teacher, had once given his class an assignment: “What I Would Do If I Were President.” Among Evan’s answers: “I would talk to people that cause harm to others and tell them to go to church!”

His parents said: “We say to those gunmen, that is Evan’s statement to you this day.”

Evan, they said, “loved everything that is beautiful and lovely about this world.”

Teachers and school administrators agreed. They bragged about a boy who had won an award in a summer reading program and could already string together long sentences in beautiful handwriting.

Collins, a teacher for 20 years, struggled to find the right words to describe him: “Bright. Bubbly. Generous. Very intelligent. Very kind. A terrific artist. And a heart of gold. He would share with anyone anything he had.

“It’s so unfair. You have a loss here that’s going to affect the entire world. This is the kind of child who would have made a contribution that never would have stopped. Never, ever.”

Fay Jernigan, Evan’s teacher in kindergarten and first grade, said he was “wise beyond his years but still knew how to be a little boy.”

“It’s a senseless loss,” Jernigan said. “You hear it all the time. It’s a cliche. But this--this is hard to understand.”

That was evident Wednesday in school--where the chair at the desk Evan Foster used to occupy remained empty and a group of second-graders tried with crayons and pencil to fathom a mystery while paying tribute to a pal.

“Evan is special,” one child wrote beneath a drawing of a smiling red sun shining down on friends playing tetherball and kickball and holding hands.

“I’ll try to see him in the air. But everyone dies sometime. I just feel that it’s not right for someone young to die.”

Funeral arrangements for Evan were incomplete, said Cleveland, the hospital spokeswoman. The Evan Leigh Foster Foundation was started Wednesday at the Wells Fargo Bank on Green Valley Circle in Culver City.