3 Students Critically Hurt in Shooting Near School

Three teenagers were critically wounded outside their Woodland Hills high school Tuesday when men in a red car paused at a Ventura Boulevard bus stop, shouted a gang challenge and fired into a crowd of students on their way home.

The victims, all students of Taft High School, were unintended targets of an apparent gang attack, said Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton. A girl, 17, and two boys, 15 and 16, were each struck “point blank” in the upper body, Bratton said, yet each was expected to survive. Authorities did not release the names of the students.

“There was a girl who got shot in the back, with blood coming out of her mouth,” said Aaron Joseph, 15, a sophomore who saw the shooting. “And the other kid ... he was really in a lot of pain, crying.”

The shooting occurred just after 2 p.m. near a Ralphs supermarket parking lot at Winnetka Avenue, across the street from the campus. School had ended early Tuesday and scores of students were milling about the corner, with a handful sitting on a bus bench waiting for a ride home. At least two black men in a red Mitsubishi rolled up to the curb and asked, “Where you from?” -- a customary gang challenge, police said.

According to witnesses, one youth at the Metro Rapid bus stop yelled back, “Hey, where you from?” while another yelled a gang moniker. The red car circled the block and returned. The passenger, who wore a red and white cap, thrust a semiautomatic handgun out of the window and fired at least three times. The car then sped off at “freeway speed,” students said.

Witnesses described a scene of panic as gunshots rang out and students dropped scooters, backpacks and clothing and ran for cover or threw themselves to the ground.

A weeping Erin Salcedo, 17, said she was standing about 10 feet from the victims. “I heard the shots,” the senior said. “Everyone threw me to the ground. I saw one girl’s body ... I was terrified and ran. I just saw the blood and I started freaking out. I ran.”

Ninth-grader Dan Mooney, 15, said, “I heard gunshots and saw three people on the floor. I heard people scream. People were running everywhere.”

A 16-year-old junior who declined to give his name said he watched in disbelief as the passenger leveled the weapon. He said the car “stopped right at the bus stop, waited maybe 10 seconds, then pow, pow, pow.”

Witnesses said the attackers were “young, maybe 18 or 19.”

The wounded girl and 16-year-old boy were taken by ambulance to Northridge Hospital Medical Center and Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills. The 15-year-old boy was flown by helicopter to UCLA Medical Center in Westwood.

Authorities confirmed student claims that there had been a fight about 10 minutes before the shooting at the Ralphs parking lot, but could not say whether it was connected. But investigators were sure that the victims -- described as white and Latino -- were not the intended targets.

“We believe he missed his intended target,” Bratton said at a news conference.

The shooting alarmed students and parents of the award-winning San Fernando Valley high school, considered safer than many other Los Angeles area schools.

“This is Woodland Hills,” said Stacy Mendoza, 17, a junior. “It shouldn’t happen here; it isn’t a place of violence.”

Fall classes began last week for the 3,400-student school, and administrators said the year had begun quietly.

Interim Principal Pete Ferry said the injured students “were sweet, innocent kids who wouldn’t be involved in anything like this....We do know they’re not gang members; they were innocent victims of this thing.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District planned to send crisis and violence management teams to the school today, and beef up security, said Alan Kerstein chief of school district police.

Two additional school police officers will patrol Taft for the rest of the week to assist the full-time campus officer, Kerstein said.

“Visible patrols will increase, especially in early morning and afternoons,” he said. “We will make sure the area is very saturated.”

At Providence Holy Cross, parents of the boy there arrived in tears. Members of Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn’s crisis response team surrounded the couple and told reporters that the family was waiting for the boy to get out of surgery.

Despite the school’s suburban location in an expensive West Valley neighborhood, some students and parents say Taft has its share of racial tensions among white, Persian, Latino, Asian and black students.

Tuesday’s shooting was not the first time gang-related violence has visited the school, which was last year’s city Academic Decathlon champion and runner-up in the state competition.

In 1992, during the first days of the school year, a 15-year-old Taft High School football player was fatally stabbed as he waited for a bus outside the school. The boy, LaMoun Thames, commuted 35 miles a day to Woodland Hills from his home in South Los Angeles because his family believed the campus was safer than schools in their neighborhood.

Authorities said Thames was mistaken for a rival gang member. As in Tuesday’s incident, detectives said that a group of young men drove up to Thames and asked him, “Where you from?” A jury convicted a Northridge gang member, Oscar Lopez, 28, in that killing.

Statistically, the Taft shooting was unusual. A Times analysis of Los Angeles Police Department homicide data shows that although there were 600 killings within a quarter-mile of one of the district’s 50 high schools between 1988 and 2002, 40% of them were concentrated around just five schools, none of which are in the Valley.

Two were in South Los Angeles -- Manual Arts, which had 88 homicides in its vicinity, and Dorsey, with 45 homicides in its vicinity. Belmont High School in Central Los Angeles had 43 homicides within a quarter-mile. There have been two homicides within a quarter-mile of Taft over the last 15 years.

In general, although the Valley has a share of violent crime, its numbers are dwarfed by those of South Los Angeles, where the concentration and frequency of shootings are far higher. In the month prior to Sept. 6, 125 people were shot in the LAPD’s South Bureau, compared with 46 in the San Fernando Valley Bureau, according to LAPD statistics.

And teenage victims are much more likely to die in other parts of the city. More than 1,000 victims 15 to 18 years old have died in the South and Central Los Angeles bureaus of the LAPD in the last 15 years -- or 70% of all Los Angeles victims in this age group. Fourteen percent of these youths died in the Valley.

Shideh Kavaini, 18 and a senior at Thoreau Continuation School across the street, went to Taft for three years. She was sitting outside a coffeehouse with friends, shaking her head about what had happened Tuesday when she predicted that parents would take their children out of the school.

“Half those kids are going to be transferred out tomorrow,” Kavaini said. “I’ll bet you anything that people around this neighborhood are going to be terrified, but we’re not surprised. We’re teenagers. We know what goes on.”

*

Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein, Richard Winton, Erika Hayasaki, Wendy Thermos, Jill Leovy, Doug Smith, Patricia Ward Biederman, Stephanie Stassel and Monte Morin contributed to this report.