When the mail came to Juanita Palacio's apartment in Athens Park on Wednesday afternoon, she was ecstatic. Buried in the junk mail was something she had long yearned for--her school bus driving license.
She had recently graduated from a bus driving course and would soon be taking children to school. Triumphantly, she called family and friends to tell them the news. It was one of the proudest days of her life.
It would also be her last.
A few hours later, as the 42-year-old immigrant from Belize sat on her navy blue leather couch watching the news on TV, a suspected gang member fired several shots from outside her front room window, Los Angeles County sheriff's investigators said.
The shots were apparently meant for a man her daughter knew, deputies said. Instead, one bullet struck Palacio in the heart. She was rushed to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.
Investigators said Thursday that they had arrested three suspected gang members on suspicion of murder in connection with Palacio's death.
Taken into custody were Martin Fields, 18, and two juveniles, 17 and 15, whose names were not released because of their ages. A handgun, believed to be the murder weapon, was discovered in a stolen vehicle the suspects were driving, deputies said.
Outside the beige stucco two-story apartment on 120th Street near Normandie Avenue where Palacio lived, her 18-year-old daughter Nalgia Myers spoke Thursday of the events that led to her mother's final moments.
"I had just gone outside and was talking to a friend when he noticed this car drive by and he said: 'Watch out, they might make a U-turn,' " Myers said in a dazed monotone.
But the car did not turn. Instead, Myers and her friend--a man she said she knows only as Brandon--heard a car door shut. A few seconds later, a young man was running toward them.
They rushed into the house. Before she could warn her mother, shots blasted through the large living room window. A hysterical 911 call followed. Paramedics arrived quickly. But Palacio lay mortally wounded.
Myers said her friend did not belong to a gang and that she did not know why anyone would shoot at him.
"I looked at her in the ambulance and I knew she was already dead," said Stephanie Aldana, 22, the oldest of Palacio's five children, who rushed to the apartment when she heard the news. "She always tried to protect us and always said to stay inside when it got dark. Now look what happened to her when she was inside."
