NOW, COPS ARE TARGETS.

Byline: Dana Bartholomew Staff Writer

Ex-cop Richard Elizondo and his son had no sooner arrived home with a truck full of groceries than a volley of gunfire erupted outside their garage.

Bam.

The automatic garage door closed with a thud.

``The next thing I knew, I was laying flat on my back, looking straight up at the ceiling, unable to move,'' recalled the former police officer. ``My son said, 'Dad, we've been hit. Dad, we've been hit.'''

Six years later, Elizondo lies paralyzed from the neck down, the victim of an apparent gang hit days before he was scheduled to testify in a gang-related homicide trial.

It wasn't supposed to end this way. Not for the poor kid from a rough neighborhood who dreamed of becoming just like Officer Pete Malloy, chasing Los Angeles tough guys in the TV series ``Adam 12.''

Not for Elizondo's father, Lorenzo, an immigrant from Mexico who died soon after the shooting - his heart broken by his son's crippling wound.

And not for Elizondo's 75-year-old mother, Grauven, who commutes each day from her Boyle Heights home to tend to her son at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center in Downey.

At one time, gangsters shot gangsters. Not civilians. And never cops.

``It was a different era then,'' said Elizondo, 41. ``If you didn't want to be a gang member, they didn't want anything to do with you. Since I was more afraid of my parents than gangs, I was more into riding my bicycle or hanging out with my buddies.''

As a boy, Elizondo was a police Explorer on his way to a 14-year career as a cop in Maywood, the Los Angeles Housing Authority, Bell Gardens and Hawaiian Gardens.

He would work undercover narcotics in such housing projects as San Fernando Gardens in Pacoima. He'd work homicide. And he'd pursue rapists, wife beaters and child molesters.

He charged hard, he said, but he was fair. Despite hundreds of felony arrests, he never was accused of mistreating or roughing up a suspect.

After Hawaiian Gardens officials decided to close down their minuscule police department in the late '90s, Elizondo found himself teaching criminal justice at a local adult school. He was also still testifying in residual police court cases.

One night in January 1998, an assassin lay in wait by the bushes outside his Pico Rivera condominium. The shooter was 22, a known gang member. He lived outside the area. He held a 9 mm automatic pistol.

Elizondo was hit in the neck, above his shoulder blade, with a bullet lodged between two vertebrae. His 15-year-old son was hit twice in the chest, with a bullet through his lung.

The shots rang out just as Elizondo's son hit the garage door button. When it closed, they were trapped inside - out of sight and earshot of police and paramedics.

``I started fading away. All of a sudden, I started breathing really shallow. I could hear the ambulance and police,'' Elizondo said. ``We lay there. I couldn't call for help. He couldn't call for help. I was trying to scream for help, and it wouldn't come out. I didn't have the wind, and neither did my son.

``I told my son to do everything in his power to get up and open the garage door. If (he) didn't, we were going to die.''

His son managed to open the door. They got help, and his son recovered from his wounds.

The gunman was later caught and given two 25-year sentences for attempted murder, plus an additional 14 years for parole violation.

Last week, Elizondo lay in bed, cheerful despite agonizing pain associated with his gunshot wound. He once weighed 180 pounds. He now weighs 135.

Economically, he is all but broke and has managed to live on Social Security. Though he believes the shooting was work-related, the city of Hawaiian Gardens would not honor his workers' compensation claim.

He is paralyzed, except for partial use of one hand, which he uses to navigate a laptop button mouse.

``So far, so good,'' he said, winding up a computer chess game in which he beat the pants off a chess monkey, his computer opponent. ``Good thing I'm a quadriplegic. If I was a paraplegic, I think I'd spend all my time playing video games.''

He's been too busy hitting the books.

In the six years since he was shot, he has attended California State University, Long Beach, with the help of a German shepherd companion. With the aid of voice-recognition software, he earned a degree in psychology.

He's now close to earning a master's degree in counseling and is on his way to a Ph.D. At Rancho Los Amigos, he counsels gunshot victims and wheelchair patients. He has volunteered at the Center for Independent Living. He wants to help people with with spinal-cord injuries live life to its fullest.

He's not bitter about getting shot. About chronic pain. About the wife who left him. About gangs in general. He's no longer angry. He at first said ``justice'' has been served, but struggled to find a better word.

``Atonement,'' he said. ``Mine.

``It was a new beginning. The past was the past, and I wasn't going to get any of it back.

``I enjoy my life much more than I did before. ... (I) don't take anything for granted. I wake up in the morning. I have a beautiful view.

``And I can beat the monkey at chess.''

Dana Bartholomew, [phone]

dana.bartholomew(at)dailynews.com

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(color) Former police officer Richard Elizondo was paralyzed when he was shot by a gang member six years ago, just days before he was scheduled to testify in a gang-related homicide trial. His mother, Grauven Elizondo, 75, commutes from Boyle Heights to Downey every day to be with him.