Woman Killed in Apparent Carjacking in Alhambra : Crime: Gunman shoots her but does not get her car. The attack is the seventh such incident reported in the Los Angeles area within a month.

A 27-year-old Monterey Park woman was fatally shot during an apparent carjacking attempt in the parking lot of an Alhambra fabric store Monday afternoon, police said.

Investigators said Kathy May Lee had just driven into the lot beside the House of Fabrics store on West Valley Boulevard. when a gunman approached her gray Lexus sedan, yanked open the door on the driver’s side and fired a single pistol shot into Lee’s chest as her mother watched in horror from the seat beside her.

Although mortally wounded, Lee shifted the car into reverse in an attempt to escape, police said. The gunman, described only as an Asian male in his late teens or early 20s, fled as the car backed across the lot before stalling near the lot entrance, officers said.

Paramedics rushed Lee to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, where she died about an hour after the 2 p.m. shooting.

Lee apparently was the second woman to die at the hands of a would-be carjacker in the last six days. Monday’s attack was the seventh such incident reported in the Los Angeles area within a month.

Sherri Foreman, 29, died of stab wounds Wednesday, a day after she was attacked. Her unborn fetus was also killed in the assault near an automated teller machine in Sherman Oaks.

Foreman was getting into her car, parked about 40 feet from a Great Western Bank branch, after apparently withdrawing some money when a man demanded her car and stabbed her in the abdomen, Los Angeles police said.

On March 25, a man fleeing the robbery of a Van Nuys grocery store hijacked a car at a railroad crossing only to be killed moments later when the vehicle slammed into a power pole.

Two days earlier, police arrested a man after he crashed the Mercedes-Benz he allegedly had hijacked at an intersection in Northridge.

On March 16, Emmett Barney, 22, his 19-year-old wife, Mignon Taylor, and their 2-year-old son were wounded by gunfire during an attempted carjacking in South-Central Los Angeles.

The day before, a gunman shot 74-year-old Naghi Ghoraishy to death at a service station in Chatsworth before fleeing in Ghoraishy’s luxury sedan. The car was found abandoned.

A 14-year-old boy pushed Esther Keeley out of a car in Canoga Park, breaking her hip, nose and jaw in an attempted carjacking, police said. The youth pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the attack.

The spate of violence has prompted Gov. Pete Wilson to call for state legislation imposing stiffer penalties on carjackers.