The Oakwood section of Venice does not look like a war zone. Most days, despite troublesome street crime, it is a place of quaint bungalows and front-yard vegetable gardens where you don't need to call before dropping by with slices of fresh-baked pie.

But fear gripped the ethnically diverse neighborhood Monday as jittery residents kept children home from school and shared worries with neighbors that two Sunday night killings would escalate a two-week war between black and Latino gangs that usually live side by side in peace.

As police promised to continue stepped-up patrols in the half-square-mile community, residents awaited a Thursday visit from Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams. The community meeting was planned before the recent spate of violence, which is evoking frightening memories of a 1979 war between the same two gangs that took at least four lives.

"There's going to be retaliation for this," predicted a resident who lives near the site of one Sunday shooting, which left one man dead and two women wounded. "This ain't the end of it."

Officials at Westminster Elementary School reported that a third of the roughly 400 schoolchildren in the neighborhood stayed home Monday, a larger than usual number.

Last week, in response to continued shooting incidents--including one in which police were fired upon for the second time in two weeks--worried parents were showing up to take children home early after hearing a car engine backfire near the school, said Principal Betty Coleman.

Police said there have been no arrests from Sunday's two fatal shootings.

In one, a man said to be affiliated with the black gang was killed and two black women were wounded in an apparent gang attack by two Latino men, police said. In the other, two hours later, a black man with a handgun opened fire on three Latino men parked in a car, killing one and wounding the other two.

Police were unsure if the second attack was gang-related or if the two incidents were linked.

"You have gang rivalry, racial rivalry and narcotics rivalry," said Detective Bernard Rogers of the West Bureau CRASH unit, a Westside anti-gang detail that has put about half of its forces in Oakwood over the past two weeks. "You have very intense hatred and very, very severe criminals."