Before Thanksgiving weekend was over, some of the very things two families had just given thanks for were gone -- taken from them suddenly, in torrents of street violence.
The families of a 19-year-old college student and a 43-year-old mother of three were reeling Sunday from the brutality of two separate drive-by shootings carried out by suspected gang members.
Nicole Williamson's parents were in their Carson home early Saturday morning when they heard the gunfire. Her father walked outside and found Nicole bleeding to death in her car, where she had been listening to music with a friend.
A criminology student, Williamson had been returning to her old high school to help teach routines to members of the flag squad.
"She was just a girl," said her father, Gregory Williamson.
In Hollywood, the husband and children of Rosalba Acosta were with her in the family truck Thursday when a bullet crashed through the rear windshield and struck her in the head. The 43-year-old stay-at-home mom had been driving her family home from a Thanksgiving dinner with friends.
Acosta had helped her husband start an auto repair business and was spending much of her time raising their youngest child, 3-year-old Andrew.
"Everything was working so good for us," said her husband, Ruiz.
According to police, none of the victims had gang ties: Acosta's slaying may have been a case of mistaken identity, and Williamson's attackers were most likely gang members targeting a small group of boys who had been chatting with her on the street.
The assailants also shot Williamson's friend Raynisha Bates in the torso multiple times. She was listed in stable condition.
The families, who had begun the weekend counting their blessings, found themselves trying Sunday to deal with the brutality and foolishness of the anonymous attackers, all of whom remained at large.
"It was probably one of those gang members," Ruiz Acosta said. "They'll shoot anybody, you know?"
The slayings came toward the end of a year that has seen the murder rate drop significantly across Los Angeles County, driven to a large degree by a 25% decrease in homicides in the city of Los Angeles. According to Los Angeles Police Department statistics, there were 442 homicides in the city through Nov. 22, compared with 590 by the same date in 2002.
But those numbers do little to assuage the grief of the two families.
