"Why me?"

Those were the last words a 14-year-old Oakland boy spoke before a gang member shot him to death, thinking he was avenging a friend who had been slain by rival gang members, an Alameda County prosecutor said Thursday.

Julio Montano and the gang member who drove him from the East Oakland murder scene, Francisco Zamora, were mistaken, Deputy District Attorney Casey Bates said. The boy, Ricardo Cortes Jr., had nothing to do with gangs.

On Wednesday, a jury in Oakland convicted Montano, 23, and Zamora, 29, of first-degree murder.

Ricardo was a student at Far West High School in North Oakland. Just before nightfall on Aug. 21, 2009, he was playing with friends on the 1700 block of 47th Avenue when Montano and Zamora walked up.

Montano, a member of a subset of the Sureño gang, pulled a gun that had been wrapped in cloth and muttered an expletive about a rival gang.

Just before Montano pulled the trigger, Ricardo asked him, "Why, why me?" a witness testified.

"I'm haunted by the victim's last words," Bates said. "For me, it just epitomizes the senselessness of this act and also underscores how brutal the killing was.

"Montano had to have known that this was an innocent child," Bates said. "This poor child begged for his life."

The victim's father, Ricardo Cortes Sr., 31, said in an interview Thursday, "My son wasn't in a gang. He was in school. Those guys don't care about my family or other people. Those guys are very bad people."

He added, "These were two big guys (who targeted) a little kid. ... My son will never come back."

At Far West High, a college prep school that focuses on the arts, Ricardo was rarely seen without a black book filled with his artwork, pencils and other supplies, said former after-school coordinator Coriander Melious.

"He would often come to my office to help me make signs and stuff," Melious recalled Thursday. "He was very eager to do anything that had to do with artwork."

Prosecutor Bates said Montano and Zamora had been gunning for rivals because of the killing of their fellow gang member Juan Carlos Betancourt, 22. He had been shot to death with an assault rifle three days earlier at the Rainbow Recreation Center at 58th Avenue and International Boulevard.

Two other members of Montano and Zamora's gang, both teenagers, were wounded in the shooting, Bates said. No one has ever been arrested for the attack.

The prosecutor said he would seek the maximum prison term for Montano of 50 years to life when Superior Court Judge Allan Hymer sentences him Dec. 10. In addition to the murder charge, the jury convicted Montano of an enhancement for using a gun.

Zamora faces a sentence of 28 years to life in prison. Besides the murder count, Zamora was convicted of being an ex-felon in possession of a gun.