LOS ANGELES — Arms flexed in a muscleman pose, Aaron Shannon Jr. was getting ready for a Halloween party while his grandfather snapped photos of him in a Spider-Man costume.
The click of the camera was replaced by the pop, pop of gunfire and the 5-year-old boy was shot in the head.
The Oct. 31 attack, blamed on misdirected gunfire from suspected Crips gang members raiding Bloods turf, harkened back to the carnage of the 1980s and early ’90s when brazen young men patrolled the streets of the area once called South Central and gave little thought to living or dying.
Then, Aaron’s death likely would have flared the Crips-Blood rivalry further and been followed by a retaliation shooting, then another and so on.
“In the old days, this would have been a massive bloodbath,” said Guillermo Cespedes, head of the city’s gang-reduction program. “An incident like this, even a couple of years ago, would have created many more days of violence.”
But it hasn’t. After the shooting, at least a half dozen city-funded gang interventionists, experts who are often former gang members, and volunteers hit the streets to prevent retaliation.
Residents incensed by the killing of a child were quick to provide details to police, who on Friday announced the arrest of alleged gang members Marcus Denson, 18, and Leonard Hall, 21.
The boy’s shooting and the days that followed have served as both a reminder of the strife that is all too common in South Los Angeles, and a sign of how much has changed.
Aaron was the 32nd person killed in the 12 square miles of LAPD’s 77th Street area this year. That homicide rate is the neighborhood’s lowest in decades and a fraction of the 161 slain at the height of the crack epidemic in 1991.
