Twenty years ago, amid the shock of the ongoing Los Angeles riots, there was a story that really grabbed headlines: The youngest victim of the violence had been shot while still in her mother’s womb.
On April 30, 1992, Elvira Evers, then 7 ½-months pregnant, watched her Compton block fill with vehicles laden with stolen loot. The nearby swap meet had turned into a free-for-all. As she waited for her eldest son to come home that night, she pushed her 5-year-old daughter Nela into her home.
“I started getting nervous,” Elvira Evers said.
A minute later, she felt like her body was aflame. She’d been shot in the belly.
Amid the chaos occuring all over the South Los Angeles region, it would have taken 40 minutes for an ambulance to arrive, so a friend drove Evers to St. Francis Medical Center. She had an emergency caesarian section and didn’t wake up for a week.
