Shooting of Girl Adds Anguish to Mourning

Pauline Rios was among hundreds of mourners who attended the rosary for her friend Mikey Ramirez on Friday night, four days after the fresh-faced 14-year-old was shot in what police call a gang-related incident.

Friends say Ramirez wasn’t a gang member; he just had lots of friends who were. So do most kids living in the unincorporated area of Walnut Park, they say.

They are dangerous friends to have.

As Pauline sat on the sofa looking at pictures of her dead friend in his living room at about 11 p.m., someone in a passing car opened fire, striking her near the spinal cord.

Saturday, as Miguel Angel Ramirez was being buried, Pauline lay in Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center with a collapsed lung and a bullet in her back that doctors are afraid to remove. The 14-year-old girl might never walk again.

Chest Pains

Family members say it will be at least several days until it is known whether the paralysis in the girl’s legs is permanent. They said she was in fair spirits but complained of pain in her chest.

There was also a lot of pain on 76th Place.

Relatives gathered on the porch of Ramirez’s house, sipping beer and talking about the boy who was killed by a shotgun blast on Monday. Two 13-year-olds have been arrested in the slaying.

“He made everyone laugh,” said Robert Crete, the boy’s godfather. “If you had a sad face he wanted to cheer you up.”

During the week, friends washed cars and collected donations at school, raising more than $1,000 for burial expenses.

Sheriff’s deputies showed up Saturday at the funeral, which was attended by hundreds of mourners.

Afterward, dozens of teens hung about the block wearing black sweat shirts that read: “Lil Mikey RIP.” The same sentiment was sprayed painted, along with gang writing, all around the neighborhood: on walls, on a large sign painted with tears in the yard, on the water heater behind the house, carved into the family mailbox and even splashed on the side of a car.

In the dirt where a lawn once was, a face with a downturned smiled labeled “Lil Mikey” was scratched. It was soon trampled over by kids playing ball.

“It looks like a .45,” said one boy as he fingered the quarter-sized hole in the window of Ramirez’s house. A kitten on the other side nuzzled up to the shattered glass ringing the hole.

Standing in the street, two 11-year-olds argued over how many shots had been fired. One sucked on candy as he causally tossed off the names of gangs and talked about how often he hears gunshots when he tries to sleep.

Relatives speculated that murder was not the aim of the shooting.

“If they were shooting for people they would have wiped them out,” Crete said. “They would have dropped like flies. They were aiming high at the house.

About a 100 people--maybe half of whom were gang members, according to police--were milling in the street drinking beer Friday night when the car approached slowly.

“What’s up?” someone called out from the car before letting loose with a burst of gunfire. They continued on down the street firing two more volleys, about a dozen or more shots in all, witnesses said. People in the yard, including children, said they felt bullets whiz by.

The second shot went through the living room window and drape before it hit Pauline Rios.

Crete ran out of the kitchen to find the girl on the floor.

“Call my mom,” she cried. “Please call my mom. I can’t feel my legs.”

“She didn’t even know she was shot,” he said.