San Clemente Girl, 4, Hurt in Drive-By Shooting

In what is apparently the first drive-by shooting in the city, a 4-year-old girl was wounded by gunfire Sunday night during a Christmas Eve party at a neighbor’s home, police said.

The girl was rushed to Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, where she was listed in guarded condition Sunday night, a nursing supervisor said. A relative identified the child as Lorena Caudillo.

The girl, whose family lives on Avenida Pelayo, had been playing on the second-floor balcony of a next-door neighbor’s apartment around 7:45 p.m., police and witnesses said. They said it appeared that she was grazed by a shotgun pellet below the left eye and perhaps on the torso.

The assailants are believed to have left the scene in two cars, police said. Police said the assailants may be gang members but that no one was immediately apprehended.

“I was in my room and I ran outside” to the balcony “because I heard her crying,” said Lupe Lucio, 19. Lucio said the little girl was at her home for a holiday celebration.

“I thought a wine bottle had exploded and she had cut herself,” said Lucio, who speaks Spanish, through an interpreter. “But then I saw the wine bottle hadn’t broken, and I realized” that the sound that she had heard “was something that came from like a gun.”

Lucio said Lorena appeared “very, very scared . . . . She was crying a lot, but she was conscious and walking.” Police on the scene also described the victim as alert.

Lucio said she rushed the girl next door to her parents, who were to come over to the neighbor’s home later to join the celebration. Lucio said she cleaned up the girl and tried unsuccessfully to stop the bleeding before paramedics arrived.

Police said they were searching Sunday night for two cars believed to have been involved in the attack--an older-model Buick and a Nissan, said to have been carrying about seven people between them. One of the cars may have been abandoned later in neighboring San Juan Capistrano, police said, and they were looking there for suspects.

Sgt. Neil Murray of the San Clemente Police Department said the shooting is believed to be the first ever drive-by attack in the city.

“San Clemente’s not known for this kind of thing,” Murray said. “We have a small, insignificant gang problem, but we have yet to experience any kind of drive-by shooting. This is very unusual for us. . . . You just don’t anticipate something like this on Christmas Eve.”

Murray said Sunday night that “we don’t know too much right now about what happened,” but that “there’s always the possibility of a gang connection.

Times photographer Steve Townsley contributed to this report.