A 20-year-old woman was killed by a stray bullet while she slept in her South Los Angeles home early Sunday, according to ABC7's account of the LAPD investigation. She was not who the shooter was aiming at.

What the police say happened

It was about 3:40 a.m. on the 400 block of West 103rd Street, just west of the 110 Freeway. The LAPD's account is that the shooter was on the street outside the home when the shots were fired, and that the woman was indoors, asleep, when a bullet struck her. The county medical examiner recorded the cause of death as a gunshot wound to the head.

Investigators have determined she was not the intended target. The shooter fled and remains at large. No arrest has been made, and no reliable suspect description has been released; a witness reported seeing a man in a red shirt running from the area, but police said it was not known whether that person was the shooter or the intended victim.

What this was

A stray-bullet death is its own particular kind of loss, and it is worth naming plainly rather than folding into the general run of crime news.

The woman did nothing that put her in the path of this. She was asleep in her own home. The violence was aimed at someone else, on a street she was not on, and it reached her through a wall. There is no chain of choices on her part that leads to the outcome, which is precisely what makes this category of killing so hard for the people left behind: there is no lesson in it, nothing she could have done differently.

She leaves a one-year-old daughter. Her family, according to a fundraising page cited in the reporting, is in Guatemala and is raising money for funeral costs and for the child.

What we are not doing

The Herald is not naming the woman, because the reporting available does not, and because next-of-kin notification and the family's wishes come before a name in a story like this.

We are also not speculating about the intended target, the motive, or who fired the shots. Those are open questions in an active LAPD homicide investigation, and filling them with guesswork would serve no one, least of all the family.

The wider fact, held carefully

South Los Angeles carries more than its share of the city's gun violence, and stray-bullet injuries and deaths are a recurring feature of it. That is a true and important context, and it is also not an explanation of this specific death, which turns on one person's decision to fire a gun on a residential street before dawn.

The Herald will follow the investigation and report an arrest, a charge, or an official account of what happened, if and when the LAPD provides one. Anyone with information can contact the department. For now, what is known is small and terrible: a young mother, asleep at home, killed by a bullet meant for someone else, and a one-year-old who will grow up without her.