‘I Heard “No! No!” Then One Shot ‘ : Santa Ana Man, 68, Slain at Apartments

By Tuesday afternoon, someone in the crowded Santa Ana apartment complex had washed away the chalk silhouette marking the spot where the 5-foot, 2-inch body of 68-year-old Santos Rodriguez Lopez had fallen.

They called him Don Santos, out of respect, and to his neighbors in the sprawling Fairview Villas, his death was more than just another statistic in a high-crime area. He was shot in the chest. Police say the motive was robbery.

It seemed cruel, one neighbor said, that Lopez should die so helplessly, alongside a trash bin, after surviving 68 years of life.

He had lent some of them tools, helped work on their cars and repaired their sewing machines. One resident of the complex remembered when he invited a family of seven acquaintances to join him and his wife, Rosa for dinner in their one-bedroom apartment.

“For my brother, he was his best friend,” said Mary Guerrero, 18, who lives with her husband, mother-in-law and four siblings in a two-bedroom neighboring apartment. “He helped him in the parking lot fix his car. He just helped him by being his friend.

“We’ve known him a year. He was a kind guy.”

It was quiet then, and, pointing to neighbors on balconies and doorsteps around the courtyard, she explained that: “Everybody who lives here knows what happened. If he was still (alive), there would be a lot of music and noise here right now.”

Before his death Monday night, Lopez had been involved in a dispute over a parking space in the blocklong compound of aging apartments, police said.

Someone had parked in Lopez’s carport, and he complained to a security guard on the premises, said Santa Ana Police Sgt. Brian Collins. Then, Collins said, “he wandered away from the guard shack.”

Later in the evening, at least one resident telephoned police to report gunfire in the area, according to Maureen Thomas, a police spokeswoman.

When police arrived they found Lopez, who weighed about 112 pounds, lying face up on the asphalt. Thomas said he had been shot with a small-caliber gun. Paramedics were summoned, but Lopez was declared dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. By 1:30 a.m., investigators had delivered the news to his wife.

Neighbors said the white-haired woman apparently did not hear the commotion in the parking area. Dimis Vidales, who lives above the couple, did.

“I heard him say two times, ‘No! No!’ then one shot,” Vidales, 30, said in Spanish as a neighbor translated. “I waited five minutes until I heard the ambulance.

“Then I came outside and saw three police officers. Then I saw the body lying there, and I knew who he was.”

He had wanted to tell Rosa Hernandez Lopez, “but I didn’t know how he was, whether he was alive or dead. She didn’t know anything was going on for a long time. . . . He was the kind of guy who liked to respect everybody. We helped each other.”

Guerrero said she and her family soon joined a crowd of other neighbors in the parking area who had heard that Don Santos had been shot.

“They drew him with chalk by the trash,” she said. “There is too much robberies here. Drugs. . . . We would move, but we don’t have money enough.”