TEENAGE SHOOTING VICTIM RAN WITH WRONG CROWD

Sheila Patricia Detoy loved to swim in the Russian River and visit with her
grandma and her aunts in the tranquillity of their Guerneville home.

But the 17-year-old also loved the edgy excitement of hanging out with a
fast-living, drug-dealing crowd in her hometown, San Francisco, her aunts
said Thursday.

It was her association with that alluring underworld that may have led to
her death Wednesday. She was shot through the head by a police officer who
fired on the getaway car in which she was riding with two alleged drug
dealers wanted by police.

Thursday night, her aunts Sheila and Patricia Detoy, for whom she was named,
remembered their niece as "a brilliant, beautiful girl" whose death, they
believe, symbolizes the failings of America's war on drugs.

"She was innocent, but she was hanging around with this world like she was
living out some hip-hop song," said Sheila Detoy. "I've been scared to death
something would happen to her for a long time."

Patricia Detoy said her niece didn't realize the danger she was putting
herself in.

"This was kind of a lark," she said. "How serious are kids at that age?"

The aunts described their niece as a precocious young woman who dropped out
of St. Ignatius High School because she was unhappy there, but who had
promptly gotten her high school general equivalency diploma.

The teenager lived at home with her mother and older sister, Sheila Detoy
said, adding that the girl's father -- a fourth generation San Franciscan,
born in his parents' home on Magellan Avenue in Forest Hill -- had died in
an accident when the girl was 3.

She used to love visits with her grandmother in Guerneville, where Aunt
Sheila raises flowers that Aunt Patty sells at the farmer's market in San
Francisco.

"I talked to her the day before (she was killed)," said Patricia Detoy. "We
were planning our summer vacation up here."

Co-workers at a coffeehouse where Sheila had recently worked also remembered
her fondly.

Mike Wall, who worked with her at the Java Beach Cafe at the Ocean Beach end
of Judah Street, described her as a "very beautiful, charming young lady."
He said that young men noticed her waist-length, reddish-blond hair and her
smile.

"She was very friendly, everyone here liked her a lot," said Wall.

"We all loved her," said another co-worker who would not give her name.
"We're really sad about this. I can't imagine this happening to her."

Her aunts say Sheila was a victim of a high-powered war on drugs that has
become a war on kids, leading to unnecessarily violent standoffs such as the
one in which she died.

"This is a terrible, botched tragedy," said Sheila Detoy. "This cop screwed
up; he had to have. Something went really wrong, because a really innocent
girl got killed."

Rather than putting money into police stakeouts and violent confrontations,
she said, more money should be devoted to drug rehabilitation and mental
health programs to help kids find a saner life. "This poor policeman,"
Sheila Detoy said, lamenting the officer who shot her niece. "They're both
victims. We're failing our kids and we're failing our cops."

©1998 San Francisco Examiner

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett