Three teens are charged in shooting

Stephen Curran

Friday, Aug. 13, 2004 | 10:57 a.m.

Three Las Vegas teens -- including two 15-year-olds -- were charged Wednesday in last week's alleged gang shooting of a 12-year-old Las Vegas boy, according to Metro Police records.

Gonzalo Antunez and Adan Delgado, both 15, and Jairo Garcia, 18, were arrested Aug. 8 after officers responded to a report of a 12-year-old boy who had been shot in the thigh as he walked alone near Eastern and Franklin avenues just south of Charleston Boulevard about 7:30 p.m., police said.

The victim was transported to Sunrise Medical Center, where he was treated for his injuries. The boy told police that he had been walking south on Eastern when a small green car made a U-turn and blocked him on a corner.

The person in the front seat of the car asked him, "Where are you from?," which is understood on the street to mean, "Which gang are in?," according to the police reports. Perez told police his response was "nowhere," but the response from the car was "Pomona Sur Locates," a gang name, which was followed by two gunshots.

According to the arrest reports, the three teens told police that the boy had flashed a rival gang sign as they drove past, so they stopped and confronted him, then one of them shot the boy with a .32-caliber handgun.

Each of the three teens was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and attempted murder with use of a deadly weapon in connection with the shooting. Antunez and Delgado were held Thursday night at the Clark County Juvenile Detention Center without bail. Garcia remained Thursday night at the Clark County Detention Center.

Under the existing statute, which dictates juveniles be charged as adults when accused of murder or attempted murder, each teen could face up to 20 years in prison, Clark County District Attorney David Roger said.

Roger said cases of juveniles charged with attempted murder are relatively rare and that attorneys examine each case individually to determine whether to prosecute them as adults.

"There are times that the individual should be treated as a juvenile and we negotiate the case back to juvenile court," Roger said. "There are other times we feel the crime is so heinous and the record so bad that the juvenile should stay in the adult system. Each matter is treated individually."

Roger said he did not know how often he prosecutes young offenders but said that it was "not often."

The shooting was one of the roughly 800 gang-related cases Metro responds to in a typical year, Sgt. Dave Stansbury of the department's Gang Crime Bureau said. Of those, Stansbury estimated as many as half involve juveniles as young as 13 years old.

"I'd say it's not unusual for us to bring in someone who's 16, 14, or even younger," he said.

Older gang members often tap the younger gang members for the more violent crimes because they know that compared with the harsher punishment in the adult judicial system, the juvenile court system metes out only "a slap on the back of the hand," Stansbury said.

Stansbury said the three teens charged Wednesday appeared to have been acting alone.

"It's probably one of those instances where he was walking down the street and he was walking in the wrong area," he said. "It was more random than anything else.

"They're out there and we deal with them on a regular basis," he said of Pomona Sur Locotes. "It's not something particularly vicious and it's not something we're going to pursue as if they're on a rampage."

Pomona Sur Locotes is one of the roughly 400 active gangs in the Las Vegas Valley, Stansbury said, and is based out of the Southern California city of Pomona.

To fight those gangs -- which Metro estimates have a membership of more than 5,700 -- the department employs 47 detectives in the gang unit, Stansbury said.