4 teens wounded in gang shooting

Mary Manning and Afsha Bawany

Thursday, Sept. 18, 2003 | 11:27 a.m.

A gang-related shooting in Las Vegas late Wednesday left four teens wounded, including one whose leg may have to be amputated and another paralyzed, authorities said.

Metro Police officers were still in the neighborhood this morning investigating and trying to find suspects.

Officers initially responded to the area around 15th Street and Oakey Boulevard about 10:45 p.m. Wednesday after citizens reported hearing gunshots.

Police said the occupants of a white car fired shots at some teens who were in another vehicle, then they abandoned the car and ran. Police found the white car abandoned at the intersection. The rear of the car was smashed.

Police said the teen who was shot in the leg was in critical condition this morning and was expected to lose his leg. A second victim appeared to be paralyzed from a gunshot wound in the back, police said.

A third teen had a head wound from a bullet that grazed him, and a fourth suffered a minor foot wound, police said.

After the shooting, detectives used a police dog to try to track down two or three suspects who had run from the white car. The officers checked homes and yards along Oakey between Maryland Parkway and Chapman Drive.

Police determined that there were possible suspects in two houses. One home in the 1400 block of Oakey was surrounded by a SWAT team but no suspects were found there.

About 20 people who live around Oakey and Griffith Avenue were evacuated from their homes as SWAT team members surrounded that first house. The residents waited in the parking lot and library of Bishop Gorman High School.

A second home in the 1300 block of Oakey, which had been searched recently by Metro for drugs, was surrounded for more than an hour, police said.

Officers tossed eight small explosives into the house to try to empty it. After each explosive, a police officer on a bullhorn shouted in both English and Spanish:

"We have a warrant. Come out now with your hands up. We're not going away. Open up the front door and come out. Act like a man."

No one appeared, and police found no one in the house.

Area residents were allowed to go back into their homes about 4:30 a.m.

A 55-year-old woman who would not give her name said she was watching television last night when she heard the shots. Her husband looked outside and saw three teens running into a nearby house, she said.

"It was terrifying. I hit the deck," she said. "It scared me to death. Everything happened so fast."

"This has always been a really quiet, sleepy neighborhood in the six or seven years we have lived here," she said. "I have never seen anything like this around here before."

Eddie Dronitsky, 19, lives three doors down from one of the houses that police surrounded. He said he had been keeping an eye on the house for the owner, who was away.

Dronitsky said he wasn't in the area when the shooting happened, but his mother was, he said. She called him, hysterical, and said a drive-by shooting had just happened.

"She's 53 years old," Dronitsky said this morning while standing in the doorway of his home. "She could have had a heart attack."

He said he was "frustrated and scared" about the gang activity in his neighborhood. He has lived in the area most of his life and said he saw the neighborhood decline in recent years.

Angela Domingo, 60, lives in a home across the street from the house that was surrounded. She wasn't evacuated but police told her to stay inside.

"We were ready to go to bed after 10:30 and we heard bullets," she said this morning at her home. "It's kind of scary ... I have to watch out now."