Murder Suspect Arrested in Fatal Drug Injection

Minutes after a vagabond died of an overdose in a vacant Santa Ana lot, with the needle still in his vein, the man who allegedly injected the drug was arrested nearby on suspicion of murder, police said Tuesday.

The drug that killed Benjamin Randall Hollingshead, 42, an unemployed transient, was not identified in an autopsy conducted Tuesday.

Lynn Tarver Clark, 40, was apprehended about 3:15 p.m. Monday as he walked away from Hollingshead, Santa Ana Police Sgt. Collie Provence said. He said Clark, who has no permanent home but whose last known address was in Anaheim, was booked into the Orange County Jail and was being held on $250,000 bail.

Hollingshead and Clark reportedly were friends,

Provence said.

Two or three people phoned police Monday afternoon, reporting that a man had been injected with something by another man, Provence said. Officers arrived and found Hollingshead unconscious, and “witnesses came forward and said, ‘Hey, this is what happened,’ ” Provence said.

Hollingshead was treated at the scene by paramedics and declared dead several minutes after they transported him to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana.

“It’s common for them to inject each other,” Provence said, “but it’s not common for us to know who the person was who injected a fatal dose into someone else.”