CHILD CRIMINALS WORRY OFFICIALS : VIOLENT KIDS ONLY FRACTION OF JUVENILE OFFENDERS.

Byline: Janet Gilmore Daily News Staff Writer

He was 11, awaiting trial on felony charges and already well beyond anyone's control.

LAPD Detective Joe Lewis had run across him a year earlier, after the boy had pulled off a robbery and tried to eliminate witnesses by setting fire to their homes and shooting when he saw them in the window.

Before his 13th birthday, the boy was dead, killed in a hail of gang gunfire.

``He was already hard core when we first ran across him,'' Lewis said of the boy. ``He looked like a regular kid; that's what made him so dangerous.''

Police Chief Willie L. Williams said similar things about a 12-year-old boy from Watts arrested Aug. 1 on suspicion of participating in the gang rape of a 13-year-old girl - a crime that preceded the fatal shooting of an elderly neighbor. The boy, who Williams claimed had long terrorized a South Central Los Angeles neighborhood, is also a suspect in the July shooting.

``When we see these kinds of things, all of us are struck that a person so young can commit - and I'll use the word - such an evil act,'' said David Disco, head prosecutor of the District Attorney's Sylmar office.

``It is surely a reflection of the fact that the mix of juvenile crime is becoming more violent, and it's becoming younger.''

While the Viola McClain killing and other high-profile criminal cases involving grade-school children capture headlines, the involvement of children 13 years old and younger account for a fraction of all juvenile crime.

Of all the youths in the Los Angeles County's juvenile halls and under probation supervision, 3 percent or fewer are below 14 years old, reports show.

But law enforcement officials worry that increasingly younger juveniles are turning to violent crime.

In Los Angeles County, for example, the number of children 13 years old and younger arrested for murder increased from eight in 1993 to 12 last year. The 12 arrests accounted for more than half the statewide total.

Craig Rhudy, an LAPD detective based in Van Nuys, argues that statistics don't tell the whole story since potentially fatal acts are not always counted as such.

``The act is more important than the injury,'' he said. ``It's only a matter of luck or fate. Assault with a deadly weapon is a murder that just didn't happen to occur.''

He recalls a recent case in which a 10-year-old girl, a straight-A student, attempted to free herself from her sister's chokehold by grabbing a knife. It landed in her sister's heart, he said, and ``damn near killed her.''

And there are deliberate, gang-related shootings where a bullet penetrates a leg rather than a vital organ.

``Nowadays if someone doesn't do this or doesn't do that the kids are going to react violently,'' Rhudy said. ``Young kids are more bold in some ways, in other ways more defiant.''

Some refuse to waive their rights or admit what they did, he said, some boast ``you can't tell me what to do.''

Lewis said he has seen children as young as 7 attempting to emulate the criminal actions of those around them - forming a group, beating up a peer and taking his money.

``You have to see it to believe it,'' Lewis says, wearily. ``It's happening more and more.''

In recent years, horrific stories about very young, violent kids have popped up in England, Chicago, the Northern California town of Richmond and elsewhere: Ten-year-old boys use bricks, stones and a metal bar to smash a toddler's skull, killing him; preteens dangle a 5-year-old from a 14th-floor apartment before dropping him to his death.

The stories are so shocking that Los Angeles County Deputy Public Defender Jim Coady said he expected to be overwhelmed by violent cases when he transferred to the office's juvenile division about 18 months ago.

He wasn't.

``Most of it is just stupid stuff,'' said Coady, who has seen cases where 8-year-olds sneak into a neighbor's house and take cake or perhaps a baseball collection, ``the downright evil cases don't come that often.''

Many kids don't get caught up in the system in the first place.

Nationwide, only 0.01 percent of children ages 10 to 17 are arrested for homicide and only 0.4 percent of youths in that age group are arrested for a violent offense like homicide, robbery or rape, according to the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.

Further, county probation officials said that 67 percent of the cases clogging the juvenile court system come from a mere 16 percent of the kids in the system, because these are kids who continue to commit crimes.

Many of those juveniles likely faced a number of common factors before turning 14: low academic performance, poor school attendance, poor conduct at school and with parents, gang affiliation, and drug or alcohol use.

Police and probation officials and others note the need for counseling programs and other preventive programs to reach these children before they turn to crime.

No answers fully explain why certain, especially young offenders turn to violent crime.

Law enforcement officials, academics and others point to reasons that include the availability of guns, more violent and graphic TV and film images, parents who are criminals or merely inattentive, drugs, poverty, lack of guidance about morality, the list goes on and on.

``They seem to get status because they're shooters or recognition from their peers,'' Lewis said of the violent kids. ``They don't seem to have a conscience like kids before them. It's like they're just desensitized.''