A drive-by shooting in South Los Angeles this week that led to the hospitalization of three children prompted Mayor Eric Garcetti and police Chief Charlie Beck on Friday to say “enough is enough” in a plea for an end to the bloodshed.
Police said the three children were eating near a taco stand at 94th and Figueroa streets at about 8:20 p.m. when a man in his 20s sprayed 13 rounds out of a sedan passing by. The bullets were intended for another target, but instead hit the children, who include an 11-year-old boy and two others, a boy and a girl both 13-years-old.
Beck said the suspected shooter was described as a black man in his 20s wearing what appears to be gold jewelry on his left eyebrow.
“We need to get this coward into custody before another shooting, or worse, a murder occurs,” he said. “Please work with us, please work with the police department. Let’s make a difference. Let’s change the narrative in Los Angeles.”
Francisca Xunxac, the mother of the 13-year-old boy caught in Wednesday’s gunfire, said her son is still in pain and feeling trauma from the incident.
“He can’t drink water. He can’t eat. And they had to make an incision in his rib to take out the blood clots,” she said through a translator.
She added that Thursday night, while she sat next to his hospital bed, she saw that her son “was delirious, he was screaming, ‘I’ve been shot, I’ve been shot! Blood! Blood!'”
“If children can’t go out to play, if children can’t go out to have a bite to eat, then what do they have?” Xunxac said.
Garcetti urged those still contemplating violent retribution to “stop the cycle of violence.”
“Enough is enough,” Garcetti said. “I would say to any shooter, or would-be shooter, whatever pain you feel because somebody has come after somebody you love, don’t become the person who inflicts the same pain on a new set of people. Do the right thing; you have the power.”
Beck said programs exist to reduce gang violence, but young men continue to die in Los Angeles, saying, “119 times this year, a young man — and it’s primarily a young man — is killed by someone who is much like him, who lives within a few blocks of his residence, over nothing, over imagined slights, over disputes that go back decades, over school yard fights.”
“And we must as a city find a way for our young people to solve their disputes that doesn’t involve their gun,” Beck said.
He urged anyone with information about Wednesday’s shooting to contact the LAPD Southeast Division detectives at (213) 972-7942 or by calling (877) LAPD247.
— City News Service