GANG WATCH : Innocence Lost

It happened again. Another random shooting. Another innocent child caught in the gang cross-fire.

Alejandro Vargas, age 11, was murdered by a stray bullet as he stood on the front lawn of his school campus in Compton. He was killed, police said, by a bullet directed at a security guard who had just chased four gang members from the Bunche Middle School campus.

The fifth-grader, described by a neighbor as “the sweetest thing this side of heaven,” is by no means the first child killed this year at or near a school in that area. “In Beverly Hills, it would be unusual,” a Compton detective said. “Here, it’s not unusual.” So, are we all numb to it?

Alejandro is not likely to be the last to need a child-size coffin in Compton--or anywhere else--where gun-toting gang members terrorize. Bullets know no boundaries.

Yet sorrowful and exasperated school officials cite their anti-gang measures, and ask how could anyone have prevented the random shot fired from a nearby alley?

Angry parents demand, and rightly so, that their children must be safe at school. The parental outrage should be shared by every Angeleno. No one should be numb to the violence--not the people who live with it daily in urban war zones nor the people who mistakenly believe it could never happen in their seeming islands of calm.

Gangs and their deadly cross-fire mar the fabric of all of Southern California. Stopping every bullet may be impossible. But no one in this city can afford to turn their backs while mothers grieve, and children die.