Compton Girl Shot New Year’s Eve Dies

A 6-year-old Compton girl who was shot in the head while watching TV with her family on New Year’s Eve was taken off life support Monday evening and pronounced dead a short time later.

Lorena Lemus and Rodrigo Yanez had been told of their daughter’s prognosis. Before a noontime press conference, the mother had said she was still holding onto hope. But at the press conference, when a doctor at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center said, “The child is brain dead,” the mother gasped and collapsed into tears.

Lorena Yanez had been in a coma since Friday evening, after a fusillade of bullets came through the family’s front door, hitting her in the head and wounding two of her brothers and her father.

Police are investigating the case, but so far have no suspects or motives, said Frank Wheaton, a spokesman for the city of Compton.

Family members say they have no idea why they were the victims of such an attack while sitting on their living room couch.

Lemus spent the weekend at the hospital, waiting as doctors told her that her sons, Rodrigo Yanez Jr., 2, and Adrian Patlan, 12, and her 23-year-old husband all would recover.

After the husband was released from the hospital Sunday, he and Lemus sent their other children to stay with relatives and kept vigil in a lounge outside the pediatric intensive care unit. They slept on tables pushed together, visited with Adrian, who was learning to walk with crutches, and waited for word on their little girl.

“We’ve just put it into God’s hands,” Lemus said Monday morning.

At the request of reporters, they went to the news conference to address the media. But when their daughter’s neurologist, Dr. Rosalinda Menoni, told reporters that Lorena’s brain was destroyed and she was essentially dead, Lemus had to be led from the room, weeping.

“I think we all kind of gasped at that,” said hospital spokesperson Tessie Cleveland.

Cleveland said Menoni had tried to tell the parents the evening before that there was next to no chance that their girl would regain consciousness.

Cleveland said in many cases parents of critically wounded children do not fully understand that their children are going to die.

Normally, Cleveland said, she would prefer not to have the family present when the physician talks to reporters.

After the news conference, Cleveland said, the doctor was also overcome with emotion, and approached Lemus and Yanez to discuss their child’s situation. At that time, the parents decided to take Lorena off life support.

For the family, it was the final emotional straw in a weekend of tragedy.

The horror began about 9:30 p.m. New Year’s Eve someone knocked at the door of the family’s Compton house, where they had lived for only two months.

“We were just looking for a safe place to live,” said Lemus, a lifelong Compton resident.

Lemus and Yanez assumed it was Yanez’s sister, coming to celebrate the new year.

Because the family’s front light was burned out, Yanez could not see who stood on the other side of the door.

But instead of answering his call of “Who’s there?” the person let loose a fusillade of bullets, which smashed through the door, hitting the children as they sat on the couch watching a movie on television.

Yanez, who was wounded while he was at a window near the door, said he has no enemies, and has no idea who would do such a thing.

“When he started shooting, I froze, seeing the bullets coming in,” said Yanez.

“I was breast-feeding my 1-week-old baby,” said Lemus. “I got down on the floor with my baby.”

When the attack stopped and she looked up, she saw three of her children and her husband bleeding.

In a sad irony, Lemus said, she and her husband had moved the sofa in front of the door just that day. They wanted to make the house look better for the new year, Lemus said.

After the attack, family members went back to the house over the weekend and moved out all the furniture.

“My kids don’t want to go back there,” Lemus said.

Cleveland, the hospital’s director of social services, said the hospital staff has become sadly accustomed to treating children and families who are victims of violent trauma.

She said staff members will try to treat the remaining family members for post traumatic stress disorder. Hospital staff also helped set up a memorial fund for Lorena. Donations can be sent, Cleveland said, to Bank of America, Lorena Yanez Memorial Fund, P.O. Box 2753, Huntington Park, CA 90255.

While Cleveland said she has never before seen a situation where a mother realized her child was dead during a news conference, the rest of it “is something we do rather frequently. We see a lot of trauma here.”

Lemus recalled how Lorena, a first-grader at Dickison Elementary School in Compton, loved to take care of her younger brother Rodrigo, who is expected to recover fully from a bullet wound to his buttocks.

“They loved to watch wrestling on television, and she would wrestle with him,” she said.

Lemus said Monday afternoon that she doesn’t know how she will break the sad news to her other children.

“It breaks me down when they ask how she’s doing,” she said, adding that her older son told her that Lorena “has to get better so he can throw her a quinceanera [15th birthday] party.’

“I don’t know how they could do this to my family,” she said. “Right now, I have no words.”