Family Fight May Be Cause of Carlsbad Hostage Ordeal

A police spokesman here speculated that a Mexican man who stabbed a police negotiator and a department store restaurant manager he had held hostage at knifepoint for 90 minutes Thursday may have been upset over a fight with his wife.

“That’s one angle we’re looking at, but until our detectives interview the suspect we can’t conclusively answer the ‘why’ in this thing,” Carlsbad police spokesman Sgt. Don Metcalf said Friday.

Marin Flores Corral, whose age and address are not known, was shot twice in the chest by police after he stabbed police negotiator Ramon Trujillo and hostage William Scott Neal, manager of The Broadway’s California Cafe restaurant in the Plaza Camino Real mall.

Trujillo, a 13-year veteran of the Carlsbad police force, was listed in stable condition Friday at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla with four stab wounds and a broken shoulder. Neal was reported in stable condition at Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside with stab wounds to the neck, and Corral was listed in serious condition at Scripps Hospital following surgery.

According to Metcalf, Thursday’s hostage drama in the mall second-floor restaurant began unfolding about 4:30 p.m., when Corral ran into the kitchen there yelling, “They’re going to kill me! Hide me, please!” in Spanish, witnesses told police.

A Spanish-speaking cook in the kitchen told Corral to calm down and to hide in the stockroom while he summoned help, and the cook then left the kitchen to call police, leaving a 12-inch butcher knife he had been using on the counter, witnesses told police.

Corral apparently took the knife and entered an adjacent office occupied by Neal. Carlsbad police arrived, summoned their hostage negotiators and evacuated and closed off the restaurant. The store itself remained open.

Trujillo, standing just outside the office door, then spent the next 90 minutes conversing in Spanish with Corral, who allegedly held the knife at Neal’s throat throughout the negotiations, police said. At one point, police believed they had persuaded Corral to surrender when he suddenly moved with his hostage from the kitchen toward the exit from the restaurant.

“He walked past the negotiators and found himself in a dead-end hallway,” Metcalf said. “When Corral relaxed his grip on the hostage for a moment, the hostage bolted from him directly at the negotiators, knocking Trujillo to the ground.”

Police said Corral then jumped on Trujillo and began stabbing him repeatedly. Negotiator Art Viera and patrol Officer Don Sisselberger both fired at Corral, wounding him twice.

Metcalf said Corral apparently made no demands during his negotiations with police. “We don’t know just what he was after or what set him off,” he said.

However, during the standoff, Corral’s wife, whose name was not available, was found in the mall area with head injuries and was taken, along with their daughter, to UC San Diego Medical Center. Mrs. Corral was listed in stable condition late Friday. Metcalf said he had no information on the cause of her injuries.

“This whole thing looks like a domestic dispute, but we don’t know for sure at this time,” Metcalf said. “There doesn’t appear to be any connection with the restaurant at all. He could have just as easily run into a record store.”

Police intended to interview Corral and his wife late Friday or early today.