SAN CLEMENTE : Youth Gets 14-Year Term in Shooting

A 17-year-old from San Juan Capistrano has been sentenced to 14 years in a California Youth Authority camp for pulling the trigger in a drive-by shooting in San Clemente last December.

He was one of three teen-agers who were sentenced Monday in Juvenile Court in Orange for a series of drive-by assaults on Christmas Eve in which a 3-year-old girl was shot and wounded.

Police officials called the incident the first drive-by shooting in South County.

The teen-ager, who admitted to Judge Robert Jameson that he pulled the trigger, can only be held by the youth authority until he is 25.

A 17-year-old passenger in the car will spend four years in a CYA camp on a conviction of assault with a deadly weapon. The third 17-year-old received a one-year sentence for taking part in an attempt to get rid of the car used in the crime.

The sentences were obtained through plea-bargaining, said Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Martin G. Engquist.

The alleged driver, 18-year-old Floyd Gerald Avery, has turned down an offer of 10 years in prison in lieu of facing trial, Engquist said.

Avery, a former San Clemente resident, will appear in South County Municipal Court on March 27 to answer charges of attempted murder and firing on an occupied building.

Authorities say the teen-agers belonged to a San Juan Capistrano gang, the San Juan Boys, and that they came to San Clemente on Dec. 24 to gun down members of a rival gang.

Three times that evening, they tried to fire on members of a San Clemente gang, Engquist said.

It was on their second attempt when gunshot pellets struck Prisca Lorena Caudillo, who was playing on a neighbor’s porch when she was hit on the face and chest. The child was hospitalized but recovered from her gunshot wounds.