Woman Shop Owner Pulls Pistol : 2 Shot During Foiled Liquor Store Holdup

When a man wielding a tire iron demanded that Chun Le turn over the money in the cash register of her Garden Grove liquor store Thursday night, she went for her gun.

Le’s husband heard the Santa Ana woman, 26, tell the man to wait a minute. Then she pulled a .380-caliber semi-automatic pistol and ordered the man to stay where he was.

But the man fled Cupp’s Liquor Store and Jr. Market on McFadden Avenue, and that’s when the shooting started.

By the time it stopped, the man, identified Friday by Garden Grove police as Rock Lee Fetzer, 29, of Westminster, and a store customer, Kurt Yenulonis, 19, of Santa Ana, had been wounded.

The fleeing man “just ran into me when I walked in,” Yenulonis said Friday. “ . . . I heard a shot, and then the second shot hit me in the side.

‘I Heard Gunshots’

“When I went down to the ground, I took him with me,” Yenulonis said. “When he got up to run away . . . I heard gunshots, so I wasn’t getting up.”

Rochel Olivarez, who was waiting in her car for Yenulonis, said she saw the man enter the store. “I told one of my friends he looked like a robber, and we laughed about it . . . .

“Kurt was walking in when the man was running out,” Olivarez said. “It looked like Kurt grabbed him.” Then shots were heard inside the store, she recalled. While the robber ran to a waiting car, Le continued shooting from outside her store, officers said.

Yenulonis, who said he was returning to the store to get a replacement for a ripped paper bag, heard “about seven” shots.

Two rounds from Le’s pistol hit Fetzer in the upper left back, Garden Grove Police Sgt. Ken Whitman said.

Irvine police arrested Fetzer and the alleged getaway driver, David Wooley, 24, of Irvine, about three hours later, according to Irvine Police Lt. Gene Norden.

While responding to a call of a family disturbance at Wooley’s home on Knollglen, the officers learned that another man in the house had been shot in the back, Norden said, and both men were arrested.

$25,000 Bail

Fetzer was taken to UCI Medical Center, where he underwent surgery and was booked into the custody ward on suspicion of armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon, Whitman said. He was reported in stable condition Friday.

Wooley was booked into the Orange County Jail on suspicion of the same crimes, Garden Grove police said. Both men were held on $25,000 bail.

Yenulonis was treated at Fountain Valley Community Hospital and released Friday morning. He said doctors told him that the bullet missed his lung by about three inches.

“After I got hit, I thought I was going to die,” he said. “It was like somebody hit me real hard in the ribs. Then I felt blood all over the place.”

Yenulonis, a 1984 graduate of La Quinta High School in Westminster, said he recently lost his job as a machinist and carries no medical insurance.

Consider Legal Action

He will consider taking legal action to recover “at least” his medical expenses, he said.

Police said Le’s pistol did not need to be registered because it was not carried as a concealed weapon, and she has not been charged.

” . . . She was trying to apprehend a robbery suspect,” Whitman said. “ . . . As of now there are no charges, but the investigation is still not complete . . . .

“When the investigation is totally complete, after all the statements are in, the district attorney and the investigator on the case will sit down and decide what charges will be filed,” Whitman said, adding:

“No fast and firm decisions are made until all of the information is reviewed.”

“There are a lot of business owners that have handguns in this community,” Whitman said.

Robbed Previously

Chun Le was not available for comment Friday, but Se (Sam) Le, who was in the back of the store during the incident, said his wife “wanted to protect herself and her customer.”

They bought the gun last year, he said, after he was robbed at gunpoint of $1,200 at a store he owned in La Habra.

“I had to protect myself. We face dangerous conditions . . . . Like last night, if we didn’t have (a) gun, we could have been hurt.”

Le, who immigrated to the United States in 1978, had used a gun during his service in the Korean military, he said. His wife had taken a shooting lesson and done some target practice after they bought the weapon, Le said.

“This country, there is too much robbery,” Le declared. “We got to do something about the robbery, all the liquor stores.”