Shootings Los Angeles

A stripper pleaded guilty Thursday to second-degree murder in the 1995 shooting death of a music industry executive who was slain at his rented Malibu house. Suzette Melina McClure, 29, is scheduled to be sentenced June 3. She faces up to 19 years to life in prison and a fine of $10,000 for killing Charlie Minor, whose body was found in his bedroom with multiple gunshot wounds.

Inside his tiny apartment--protected by a burglar alarm and bulletproof glass and with a 9-millimeter pistol in his waistband--Lance Thomas says he has found a measure of peace. In a little more than two years, the watch dealer killed five armed robbers and wounded another in a series of shootouts at his West Los Angeles store that made him a hero to some and a vigilante to others.

A recent wave of gang violence in Venice and on its borders has left three men dead and the eclectic beach-side community once more grappling with the future of its troubled Oakwood neighborhood. Melvyn Hayward, director of Venice's Vera Davis McClendon Community Center, said the killings and three other shootings in the last two weeks have residents on edge after months of relative calm. "At nighttime, when you come down here, you see nobody out on the streets," he said.

Again and again, they kept coming back to the children: a 6-month-old boy and a 5-year-old girl shot dead at close range as they slept on a warm spring night. No one could understand it. No one even wanted to try. As they hovered near the tiny El Monte apartment where the two children and three adults were murdered over the weekend, friends and neighbors Monday spoke of their shock and anguish, their despair and fear. Above all, they spoke of the children. "It's terrible," one woman said.

A 17-year-old student was shot and killed at Reseda High School by a 15-year-old classmate Monday as a dozen teen-agers looked on, the second time in a month that a student has been gunned down on a Los Angeles Unified School District campus, authorities said. The shooting came less than three weeks after the district launched an unprecedented program of random metal-detector spot checks for weapons in the nation's second-largest school system.

Two people died and three others were wounded in several unrelated shootings in Los Angeles on Thursday and Friday. In the first, an unidentified man in his 30s was found shot in the head and torso in the 1200 block of West Court Street just north of downtown at 5:22 p.m. Thursday. He was pronounced dead at County-USC Medical Center. At 11:05 p.m. Thursday, firefighters responded to a call in the 9400 block of South Harbor Boulevard. They found Guion Pierre Revels, 18, dead from a gunshot wound.

When it came to security, Lance E. Thomas left nothing to chance. Wherever he maneuvered near the glass display counter of his West Los Angeles watch renovation shop, there was a gun within reach. Merchants who visited Thomas regularly at his shop, the Watch Company, would watch in awe as he removed the weapons from their hiding spots--a .357 magnum handgun, a Smith & Wesson .38, a shotgun and other guns.

Robert Heard, alleged killer of a classmate at Reseda High School, is a graffiti vandal with a criminal record who tried to hold up another student at gunpoint even while fleeing the killing scene, authorities said Tuesday. Heard, 15, was arrested Monday in the death of 17-year-old Michael Shean Ensley, who was shot after the two apparently argued in a school hallway about their rival graffiti "tagging crews," authorities said.

On a shady corner of Denker Avenue Recreation Center, the wilting petals of carnations, roses, irises, petunias and tulips on a makeshift shrine are a reminder that Dwayne Capers once lived. Capers, who was a Rolling 30s Harlem Crip, was gunned down April 7 when rival Bloods walked across the park and opened fire on a group of Crips sitting on a picnic bench. A stray bullet killed 73-year-old King Clark as he sat in his living room across the street reading a lesson for his Bible study class.

There was no quick and easy way to describe how Kimberley Horton died on July 25, 1992, at the hands of a gunman who only wanted her car. The word "carjacking" had yet to creep into the national lexicon, even though the crime was soaring across the country. Horton, a 21-year-old UCLA student who dreamed of studying international law, was one of the first local victims of this new, terrifying form of car theft, a crime that shattered the illusion that people were safe inside their cars.