Boy Whose Wild Rifle Shot Killed Woman Is Sentenced

SAN DIEGO — An 11-year-old boy who tried to shoot out a street light and pierced the wall of a trailer instead, killing the mother of three young children, was sentenced Tuesday to live in a residential facility that provides education and psychological counseling until he is deemed ready to return home.

The 4-foot-5, 75-pound boy, who was 10 at the time of the shooting last month, listened to an English translation of the Juvenile Court proceedings on headphones that were too big for him. His head barely topped the back of his chair at the defense table and he seemed oblivious to the gravity of the situation.

He had been held in the county’s Juvenile Hall since the shooting occurred March 8 in a crime-ridden section of Barrio Logan, where he had been taking turns firing a .22-caliber sawed-off rifle with two boys, aged 13 and 14, from a neighbor’s rooftop.

One bullet killed 25-year-old Manuela Garcia de la Rosa as she was putting her 8-year-old son to bed. Garcia also was the mother of a 3-year-old boy, who is deaf and mute, and a 6-year-old girl. Her husband, Fidel Mariscal, was in the courtroom Monday.

Police were able to find the boys by using a laser beam to trace the trajectory of the bullet from the hole in the trailer wall to the neighbor’s home. Eventually, they tracked down the boys.

The boy, whose name was not made public because of his age, pleaded guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter with the personal use of a firearm, which exposes him to a maximum of nine years of punishment if his stay in the residential facility is not successful.