Boy, 10, Wounds Girl at School in Gun Prank

As horrified classmates looked on, a 10-year-old boy shot and critically wounded a 12-year-old girl at their church school in South-Central Los Angeles, using a pistol he had taken from a locked cabinet at home as an April Fool’s prank, authorities said.

Paramedics rushed the wounded girl, Shameka Fletcher, to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, where she was listed in critical condition with a chest wound. Surgeons removed one of her kidneys and said the girl’s spine and liver also may have been damaged, relatives said.

Sheriff’s investigators said the shooting at the New Mt. Calvary Baptist Elementary School on El Segundo Boulevard was accidental, committed by a child who thought he knew how to handle a gun from watching television.

The boy ran from the school when he realized what had happened and was found later at another school, where his parents picked him up and took him to police, said the Rev. Lonnie Dawson, pastor of the church that operates Mt. Calvary school.

“He is extremely sorry for what has happened and is very scared now,” Sheriff’s Detective Norine Plett said.

The incident shattered the sense of safety that some parents in the Willowbrook community had sought in sending their children to a private school.

“I never thought anything like this would happen to my little girl,” said Shameka’s father, Steven Fletcher. “That’s why I sent her to this school, to get her away from the problems of people bringing guns into public schools. And look what happens. It happened to my little girl.”

The shooting occurred shortly after 8 a.m. Wednesday as students were eating breakfast in the school cafeteria.

Plett said the 10-year-old had arrived with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol tucked in his knapsack. It was one of three weapons kept for protection in the boy’s home at the Ujima Village housing project in Willowbrook, where he lives with his uncle and grandmother.

The gun, which belonged to the boy’s uncle, was kept in a locked container inside a locked room and had not been taken out for years, Plett said.

But because the boy wanted to display the gun as an April Fool’s prank, he unlocked the room with a key he took from his grandmother’s purse and picked the lock on the container, Plett said.

The boy thought he had “learned how to work these guns on television,” Plett said.

The boy waited until teachers were not looking and took the pistol out of his knapsack and “was showing off,” Dawson said.

A single shot was fired, echoing through the hallways of the two-story, yellow stucco building that houses both the church and elementary school. About a dozen students watched as Shameka was hit at close range, Plett said.

“He didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Plett said. “Just something went wrong.”

Shameka, an energetic child who sings in the church choir, lives with her grandmother in a small stucco house across the street from the church. The grandmother, telephone company worker Doris Coleman, has helped scrape together the $185 monthly tuition to send the girl to the school.

There, children in navy blue uniforms pray before classes each day and take lessons replete with references to the Bible.

Shameka’s family had hoped the school would help the girl escape the threat of violence.

“I went through the public school system with my own children, and I wanted better for my granddaughter,” Coleman said.

The girl’s family is surrounded by the scars of violence. A wall outside their home is smeared with gang graffiti; ambulance and police sirens wail throughout the day, and every window of the house is barred with iron. One resident described the area as “infested” with street thugs.

Dawson said the school, which has 95 students, was created to allow parents to keep their children in the community and not send them to more distant private schools.

“The object of the school is to provide academic and spiritual learning,” Dawson said. “It’s an opportunity for parents who take their children’s upbringing seriously.”

Coming up with the tuition has been a burden, said Shameka’s father, but one that the family believed was worthwhile.

“We’re stretched to the limit as it is,” Fletcher said. “My mother’s going broke helping to pay for my daughter to be in this school, and to have this happen really makes you stop and think.”

Fletcher lashed out at the boy and at the school, which he said should have some way of checking children for weapons.

But Dawson said there never had been any reason to worry about weapons. “We never thought about anything like this,” he said. “If we had to do that, this would stop being a school.”

Dawson said the boy is a good student who has never given teachers any trouble. “We don’t have any record of him being a bad boy at this school,” he said. “This is a fine young man. He’s not a disciplinary problem. . . . We’ve lost enough of our young men. This is not one who is bad.”

Ujima Village, where the boy lives, is a complex of neat two-story apartments less than a mile from the school.

Though he lived amid gang violence, neighbors said the boy had never been violent and is liked by everyone.

“He’s the kind of kid that is playing outside all the time,” said one neighbor. “He’s never given anybody any trouble.”

Another neighbor added: “He’s a really good boy. He is about the best 10-year-old you’ll ever come across. I just can’t believe he would be involved in something like this. . . . This is such a shame. I hope the girl will be OK and the boy will learn something from this.”

But the neighbors also said that guns and violence are pervasive in the complex, where many residents are fearful of crime.

Throughout the day, friends and relatives of both Shameka and the boy searched for an explanation of how the shooting could have happened. Shameka’s grandmother and a group of relatives kept a vigil at the hospital, huddling close to a telephone in the surgical recovery area.

“I believe it was an accident,” said her grandmother, tears in her eyes. “I don’t blame anyone.”

At the school, students were sent home soon after the shooting, Dawson said.

But in the afternoon, there were still a few stragglers waiting for their parents to pick them up. They stood in their neat blue uniforms with shocked expressions on their faces, staring at the crush of traffic on El Segundo Boulevard.

Times staff writer Ashley Dunn contributed to this story.