Mother Shot, Gives Birth, Dies : Gangs: Long Beach woman was hit in a drive-by shotgun attack. Police say the gunfire was meant for somebody else.

Kentzie Pope was a new mother for about 20 minutes Wednesday morning. Then she died--the victim of a shotgun blast that apparently was meant for somebody else.

She never got to see her baby, delivered while she was on the operating table.

“(Someday) we’ll just show (the child) pictures of her mother and tell her that she was loved,” said Deirdre Pope, Kentzie’s 32-year-old sister.

“It’s a bad neighborhood,” said Madalyn Hartfield, Pope’s mother, who lived with her on Elm Avenue in a gang-infested area of Long Beach. “I told her to stay off the street; there’ll be an empty space in our lives now.”

Eight months pregnant, Pope, 30, was standing in front of her apartment complex around 11:30 p.m. with several other people Tuesday when a car carrying four people drove by. Three shotgun blasts were fired from the car.

Police Detective Logan Wren said some of the people in Pope’s group were known gang members, and investigators believe the shots were meant for someone else. Pope, an unwed mother of two, simply did not move out of the way quickly enough and was hit in the back, he said.

“When she saw the vehicle approaching she turned and started to run but was struck in the back by one of the blasts,” Wren said, adding that she was the only person hit.

Pope was rushed to nearby St. Mary Medical Center after being shot. There, unconscious but kept alive by what a hospital administrator called “aggressive resuscitation,” an emergency Cesarean was performed and doctors delivered a 4-pound, 5-ounce girl. Twenty minutes later, Kentzie Pope died from the gunshot wound to her back, hospital spokeswoman Carolyn Cohen said.

The baby, tentatively named Keyana by the family, was taken to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, where she was reported in stable but critical condition as a result of the premature birth, Cohen said.

Pope, who had no known gang affiliations, was on her way home from visiting a friend down the street when the shooting occurred, according to her sister. After staggering to the front door of the apartment and calling out, “Mama, I got shot,” Deirdre Pope said, her sister collapsed on the concrete.

“I just put her in my lap,” she said. “All I could do was pray and keep rubbing her stomach.”

Deirdre Pope described her sister as an “easygoing” woman who enjoyed watching soap operas and was looking forward to the birth of her baby in about three weeks.

The victim’s mother and sister said they intend to raise the newborn, as well as the dead woman’s two other daughters, Aiesha, 10, and Sasha, 4.

“It will be a hardship,” Hartfield said, “but we’re a close-knit family and that’s what we’ll continue to be.”

Hartfield said she and her daughters had moved to Long Beach from Los Angeles several years ago, in part to escape gang violence. They had been living on Elm Avenue for about a year, the family said, along with Kentzie’s two daughters and another child.

On Wednesday, Hartfield and Aiesha visited the hospital to get their first extended look at the new family member.

“She’s a cute little thing,” Hartfield said. “She had a hairy experience coming into the world. When she’s 7 or 8, we’ll tell her about her mother.”

Back on Elm Avenue, stunned neighbors were congregating on the sidewalk where the shooting took place, reminiscing about the young pregnant woman who had said she wanted a boy.

“I used to see her walk through the neighborhood a lot,” said Anthony Brown, 26, who lives around the corner. “She was a nice quiet lady who didn’t bother anybody. I can’t believe this.”