Stray Bullet Kills Mother, Daughter

If senseless shooting deaths are often ascribed to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, then what is to be said about Laura Reyes and her 3-year-old daughter, who were in the right place at the right time when a stray bullet ended their lives Thursday night?

The two were in the living room of their east Rancho Dominguez home when a single bullet fired from a high-powered assault weapon flew more than 300 feet, tearing through a wooden fence and a window before striking them both in the upper body.

Reyes, 28, was sitting on the couch, having just watched a Lakers game. Her only child, Celeste, was playing when two men got out of a car at a nearby intersection and started firing at a third man standing close by.

Bullets sprayed through the surrounding residential neighborhood, sandwiched between Compton and the Long Beach Freeway, ripping into yards and houses.

Only one hit the Reyes home in the 15800 block of South Frailey Avenue. But it was enough to wipe out the family of Eligio Reyes, who was also in the house but escaped unharmed.

A 20-year-old man standing near the intersection was superficially wounded in the arm.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s investigators found more than two dozen shell casings at the scene. They had identified no suspects Friday but believed the 10:23 p.m. shooting to be gang-related.

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“We’re really disgusted that nobody has the guts to come forward and say what happened,” said Yolanda Cruz, 23, Laura Reyes’ sister.

She said the Reyeses had been fixing up the house to sell so they could leave the area.

“Laura was always talking about how they wanted to move out of there,” Cruz recounted. “She wanted her daughter to live in a better area.”

One of seven children, Laura Reyes grew up in a house a few blocks away in Compton, where she would leave Celeste in the care of her mother while she worked in the Long Beach office of the county Department of Public Social Services, dealing with people who had applied for public assistance.

Friday, family members gathered in grief in the Compton home.

“I heard about it early, early this morning. It was just crazy, really,” said Cruz, who acted as the family’s spokeswoman. “We never really had any problems with stuff like this. It never really happened to us.”

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While neighbors said their block was normally quiet, they were accustomed to the rumble of gunfire.

“We’re used to hearing [gunfire] around the corner or down the street,” said a 29-year-old landscaper who counted at least five bullet holes in his metal fence.

The neighbor, who did want his name published, said he doubted that the intended targets of the gunfire were gang members. “Nowadays you don’t have to be no gang member. You just have to live in the area,” he remarked.

He had also just finished watching the basketball game and was about to go outside when the bullets started whizzing into his yard. “I would have been hit for sure,” he said.

A few doors from the well-tended Reyes home, mothers and their children chatted nervously in front of a house where a bullet had pierced the window of a bedroom where two children were sleeping.

Maria Luz Martinez said she had just laid her children, ages 3 and 7, down to sleep on her bed and gone to watch television when the shots rang out. “Thank God it was there [high up in the window] and not lower, where my kids were sleeping,” she said.

Surrounded by television news crews, the Reyes home was quiet Friday. Christmas lights were still strung along the roof. A child’s blackboard was propped on the concrete patio.

A neighbor and occasional baby-sitter for Celeste described Laura Reyes as a generous woman who gave out avocados and old clothes to people who lived nearby.

Reyes seldom left the house in the evening, the woman said, but frequently spoke to her closest neighbors. “With everyone she knew she talked a lot.”

Eligio Reyes, 27, a mover who grew up in Long Beach, met Laura through his sister, Cruz said. The couple had been married for several years, and the Frailey Avenue house was their first home.

“They were kind of homebound,” Cruz said, spending time with both of their extended families.

Her sister had gone to Catholic schools and was “basically brought up old-fashioned American-style” by their parents, who emigrated from Mexico more than 30 years ago, Cruz said.

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Laura, she lamented, was “one of those people that you don’t find all the time. . . . It hurts because they were planning to live this happy life.”

Sgt. Vincent Ramirez, who supervises the Sheriff’s Department’s Century Station gang detail, said both Latino and black gangs operate in the area. He was not aware of any recent incident that may have prompted the shooting, which he described as “typical.”

The use of high-powered weapons by gang members has become “more and more frequent,” he said.

Sheriff’s Department spokesmen said the gun in the Reyes shooting had not been found but was probably an assault rifle. It was unclear if the third victim, Oscar Rivas, was an intended target. He was treated at a local hospital and released.

Laura and Celeste Reyes were but the latest victims of errant gunfire.

A 2-year-old was killed last month when her family became trapped in apparent gang cross-fire in an area of Los Angeles bordering Carson. In January, a 17-year-old Compton high school student was killed on an MTA bus in Watts when a gang member aiming at a rival opened fire from the street.

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And a year ago, elementary school teacher Alfredo Perez was wounded in the head in front of his class when a bullet tore into the library of his Los Angeles school.

County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, who represents the Rancho Dominguez area, said she will propose a $10,000 county reward for information leading to arrest and conviction of the gunmen in the Reyes case.

“In most of these instances we can’t get anyone to be a witness,” she said. “We’re not going to get anyone arrested unless we get people who know” what happened to testify.

Describing the number of random gunfire victims as “totally out of hand,” she said she supports legislation sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) that would treat inner-city gangs’ dealing drugs as organized crime.

“If [federal and state legislators] give us the authority to do more, I would certainly be willing to do it.”