Boy Killed, 3 Hurt in Drive-By Shooting

As a mother watched television surrounded by three of her children asleep on the living room floor, two gunmen pummeled a South-Central Los Angeles bungalow with bullets early Saturday, killing her 8-year-old son and injuring her 2-year-old daughter, a teenage son and an adult cousin.

In the seconds it took the gunmen to get out of their car and shoot up the home at the corner of Menlo Avenue and 60th Street, young Ishmail Durden was fatally struck in the head.

The barrage of at least 20 bullets blasted through the wood-sided walls and shattered windows, striking the girl in the arm, the older boy in the hip and the male cousin in the abdomen.

“My kids were sleeping on the floor,” said Beverly Durden, 39, weeping as she awaited word from County-USC Medical Center doctors who were operating Saturday afternoon on her daughter, Kennedy. “When it was all over, Ishmail was shot, Kennedy was shot, they all were shot.”

Police said they had neither a motive nor suspects in the 12:30 a.m. shooting. They did not release information on the type of weapons used.

A neighbor who witnessed the shooting told the family that each assailant carried a weapon, fired into the darkened house and fled in a car.

“Thoom - thoom - thoom, thoom - thoom - thoom, that’s what it sounded like,” said Kimberly Hayes, a family member and nurse who was asleep in a bedroom before the incident.

The bombardment made the house tremble, with bullets punching multiple holes through the walls. Beverly Durden, who was sitting in an armchair, said she instantly threw herself to the ground, using the chair as protection. When it was over, the crying and the screaming began as her eldest son, Aaron, 17, who had been asleep in a back room, walked into the living room.

“I thought Ishmail was still asleep,” Aaron said later at the hospital, sitting next to his father, Kenneth. “I moved Ishmail to pick him up, but he had already been shot.”

“So, Ishmail never did wake up, did he?” the father asked.

Aaron, who has a gang tattoo on one forearm but said he “stopped gangbanging” more than two years ago, said he had “no idea” who the shooters were or why they would target the home. “I feel really messed up,” he said. “My baby brother is gone. That’s what hurts me so bad. He doesn’t know anything about this, he doesn’t have anything to do with this. They took my little brother from me.”

Nearly 20 relatives and friends kept vigil with the parents at County-USC on Saturday, some weeping and passing around tissues, others hugging each other at times.

After Kennedy came out of surgery in critical but stable condition, the family then caravaned to UCLA Medical Center to turn their attention to 13-year-old Floyd Anthony Johnson and the cousin, Ben Jones, 57.

As she left, Beverly Durden said, “I will be OK.... God will get us through this. God will get us through anything. Faith is all I need.”

The shooting took place at the home of her father, Floyd Johnson Sr., 83. His home is the family headquarters, the place they like to gather every Friday night to watch videos and catch up, often spending the night. Beverly Durden, a nursing student, and her husband, 37, a painter, live nearby.

Ishmail, a third-grader at Normandie Christian School, enjoyed boxing and even sparred at the Olympic Auditorium, aiming for his amateur boxing certificate, said Hayes, Ishmail’s aunt.

The mischievous boy, nicknamed “Little Joe Louis,” would tease her, she said, by leaving the toilet seat up at his grandfather’s house.

“He was always smiling, always playing, a fun-loving child,” Kenneth Durden said.

Beverly’s son Floyd Johnson, whom Kenneth Durden raised, is in the seventh grade at St. Raphael Catholic Elementary School and enjoys playing football and basketball.

The three children who were shot had recently been baptized at Jesus House of Prayer church near their home.

Beverly and Kenneth Durden “had an unbelievable love for their kids ... a really tight-knit family,” said their friend Brenda Lankford, 39. She, like others comforting the family at the hospital, was deeply angered by the shooting.

“The public needs to know what is going on out here,” Lankford said of the South-Central killings. “We need to stand together, and something needs to be done.”

The shootings come amid a recent spike in violent crime in Los Angeles, much of it related to gang violence that LAPD Chief William J. Bratton has labeled “homeland terrorism” in his call for a new anti-gang campaign.

According to the Los Angeles Police Department, there were 56 homicides citywide from Jan. 1 to Feb. 1. The tally for the same period in 2002 was 72.

One Durden relative, James Durden, 59, called the shooting up of the family home a “cowardly and heinous act by a black-hearted person,” and he tried to reason through the tragedy.

“Every day you read in the newspaper or hear on TV about violent acts; this is a thing of our so-called times, this lack of morality,” he said. “But when in touches you personally, it’s a whole different thing, especially with kids.”

He recalled his most frequent conversations with his nephew, Ishmail: Believe in God, obey your parents and do well in school. “I always had a good time playing with him,” James Durden said. “That’s something I will never be able to do again.”

Police said Saturday that their early lack of leads is not unusual.

“In cases like this, almost no one cooperates at first,” said Officer Joe Kuns, 31, who has worked at the 77th Street Division for six years. “You’ll hear something on the grapevine and then you ask, ‘Who told you that?’ until you get some good information. But it takes a while.”

He said that his empathy for victims of violent crime is mixed with his frustration over the “head-in-the-sand” attitude that some people have about gang affiliations.

Throughout the day, Hayes tended to visitors who stopped to express condolences and left flowers at the family home.

Police stood guard outside, television vans were parked outside, and the telephone kept ringing.

“I’ll be here until dusk, and then I have to go,” Hayes said, adding that she planned to stay elsewhere Saturday night. “I’m scared.”

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Times staff writer Stephanie Chavez contributed to this report.