Birthday celebration turns tragic

Ethan Esparza wasn’t old enough for school, but his classroom was the front porch of his family’s home in a working-class section of Pomona. There, his 8-year-old sister, Belinda, would show him her school textbooks, watch him doodle and go over the alphabet.

“He only learned half his ABCs,” Belinda said from the porch Tuesday, looking out at the frontyard where Ethan was fatally shot Sunday night during a party celebrating his fourth birthday a day early.

Ethan was playing with a toy car, a birthday gift from his father, when an SUV with tinted windows came down the street. A man got out and sprayed gunfire on the yard filled with children from the party.

They scattered -- with Ethan going into his mother’s room. Alma Torres, 25, found him moments later on the floor, gasping for air, blood coming from his mouth.

She hugged her boy as he stared at her with silent, pleading eyes. She begged him to stay.

“He looked at me like, ‘Help me, Mommy. Make everything OK,’ ” Torres said Tuesday, sobbing. “He wouldn’t even cry. What I saw when my son died was fear. He was scared. I think he suffered a lot. He didn’t want to die.”

Ethan’s death has sparked new outrage in the city of 170,000, where gang violence has long plagued some neighborhoods.

Two years ago, a 16-year-old boy drove up to California Highway Patrol Officer Thomas Steiner at the Pomona courthouse and fatally shot him in what the youth later said was an attempt to impress a gang he wanted to join. The U.S. Postal Service refused to deliver mail to one block in Pomona for more than a year after a letter carrier became frightened upon witnessing a shooting there.

Pomona has an unusually large number of active gangs for a city its size: 15, including the 12th Street gang, which has been linked to the racially motivated murders of two African Americans, according to police. During a multi-agency raid in April that resulted in the arrests of 57 people, authorities said the gang had branched eastward into the fast-growing cities of San Bernardino County.

In the wake of Steiner’s shooting, Pomona police and federal authorities launched a crackdown on gangs.

Today, crime is down significantly in Pomona, though Ethan’s killing underscores how stubborn gang violence remains in pockets of the city.

“There is no getting away from the sadness of the killing of a 3-year-old baby,” said Mayor Norma Torres. “There is a mother here grieving at Thanksgiving and a coward responsible out there.”

The killing shook the veteran homicide detective investigating the case.

“I have a little boy. My partner has four children. Yeah, it plays on us, and it hurts,” said Det. Robert Nelson, who has worked for the Pomona Police Department for 25 years. “That’s why it’s important for us to catch the bad guy.”

Nelson said he believed the assailant was a gang member and is investigating whether the gunman targeted the wrong house.

It was about 6:30 p.m. when the attacker got out of the SUV, pointing his weapon at a 16-year-old boy visiting from El Monte before opening fire, Nelson said.

“He just starts shooting, hitting the 16-year-old once,” said Nelson, adding that the teenager has no known gang ties. Children playing in the frontyard screamed and ran into the house. Alma Torres said she heard the loud blasts from inside. Moments before, she had told her son that he had to take a bath. But Ethan said he wanted to go to the frontyard to get his new toy car.

In the chaos of screaming children, her 5-year-old son, Efren, told her that Ethan was in her room and that “he got shot.” Torres found her boy on all fours, as if he had crawled into the room.

“I think he couldn’t go any further,” Torres said, wiping her eyes. “With a bullet near his heart, he ran inside looking for me. He wanted his mom.”

Torres screamed for her youngest child to keep fighting.

“I said, ‘Ethan, please baby, don’t leave me, baby,’ ” Torres said. “ ‘Please, baby, don’t leave me!’ ”

She twisted in anguish as she recalled Ethan dying in her arms. She said she is haunted by his demeanor and his obvious struggle to survive.

He was a tough boy, and even when he fell and hurt himself, he rarely cried, Torres said. As he died, bleeding profusely, he didn’t cry. He just stared at her, as if he expected her to make everything right.

Ethan’s grandfather drove him to a hospital, and someone drove the 16-year-old in separate car. The teenager was expected to recover.

On Tuesday, Torres sat on the porch with her mother, 46-year-old Maria del Pilar Torres. There was a makeshift altar on the porch, as well as a collage with scenes from Ethan’s brief life.

Torres thought about what her son’s horoscope had said, struggling to remember the exact words.

“It said something about him not minding being the one in agony, because as long as people can change, the world can change,” she said, blinking back tears.

She paused and asked, hopefully: “Do you think that’s a sign?”

Then she thought about Ethan’s last moments of pain -- how his eyes rolled up when he died -- and she cried out again.

“I want to go with him, Mom,” she said to her mother. “I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and not see him.”

Del Pilar Torres responded in Spanish that her grandson “looked up to see God.”

She took her daughter in her arms and rocked her. The grandmother has her own small child, 4-year-old Gabriel, and in desperation, she told her daughter she could have Gabriel, that he could be her son.

Then she made her devastated daughter a promise.

“Don’t cry, my princess. He’s going to visit you in a dream, I swear to you,” she said, her voice cracking with pain, her hands caressing her child’s face. “It’s going to be a beautiful dream, my princess, I swear! And he’s going to tell you you’ll see him again.”

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hector. becerra@latimes.com

Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.