A Christmas ofContrasts : Falling Bullets Spatter Area as Gunfire Marks Christmas Eve

It was Christmas Eve in Orange County, but Anaheim, Santa Ana and Garden Grove police said an unusually large number of gunshots fired by holiday celebrants made it sound more like New Year’s Eve.

“It was like the whole sky was exploding,” Anaheim Police Sgt. Jack Jansen said Wednesday.

“I was in Saigon during the Tet offensive,” added Santa Ana Police Sgt. Jim McDaniel, recalling his Vietnam War experiences, “and that’s just what it sounded like.”

“Most of them were fired from Buena Clinton,” said Garden Grove Police Sgt. Ron Fleischer, referring to a high-crime neighborhood. “There were hundreds (of gunshots), I’m sure. Officers said it sounded just like popcorn.”

During the night, one Santa Ana man shot and killed himself with a handgun, McDaniel said, and another unidentified youngster suffered a minor cut “when he walked out of his house and got hit on top of the head by a falling bullet.”

The raining bullets tore through the roof of a convalescent home near Euclid Street and Orangewood Avenue in Anaheim as well as several mobile homes in the area, police said. There also were widespread reports of shattered windows and windshields.

Police said one of the holiday shooters, Filimon Rodriguez, 23, of Santa Ana, killed himself when his .38-caliber handgun accidentally discharged, firing a bullet through his chest. The shooting occurred

about 1 a.m. near Rodriguez’s home at Bristol Street and Camden Place.

Holiday shooting is expected when the clock ticks off the last minutes on New Year’s Eve, but the rash of shooting late Tuesday and early Wednesday caught police by surprise.

“If this is any preview of what New Year’s Eve will be like, we’re in for a quite a time,” Jansen said. “I got a feeling it’s really going to be a wild New Year’s.”

Bullet Tore Through Thigh

A similar outbreak of gunfire occurred in Orange County last New Year’s Eve. One of the falling bullets tore through Holly Lynn Huffman’s left thigh about five minutes past midnight as she sat on her boyfriend’s shoulders at Disneyland.

Huffman, a 34-year-old Navy dentist, was struck by a .38-caliber slug that Jansen said was “fired up in the air, came down and hit her in the leg.”

Jansen and other officers are skeptical that anything can be done to discourage such a dangerous method of celebrating holidays. Police would have difficulty catching somebody in the act unless they flooded the streets with patrol cars, Jansen said.

Besides, randomly firing a gun into the air is only a misdemeanor offense. “We ought to have an ordinance making it a $10,000 fine or something to fire a gun during the holidays,” Jansen said.

Officer’s Dog Struck

Jansen said the danger of falling slugs hit close to home last New Year’s Eve, when a round tore through the patio roof of a police colleague and struck his dog. “The dog’s all right, but he’s really gun-shy,” Jansen said.

Virtually all the Christmas Eve shooting was confined to Garden Grove, Anaheim and Santa Ana. However, there were two reports of random gunfire in Costa Mesa and one in Irvine, where shots were fired near a Lucky’s food store warehouse.

“They were probably shooting rabbits,” an Irvine police dispatcher said.