‘He worked hard, but he was happy. He didn’t fight, and he didn’t drink.’ : Mechanic Shot Dead in Argument

A neighborhood mechanic who often slept in his own immaculate 1958 Chevy to protect it from vandals and thieves was gunned down while at work on East Adams Street in Santa Ana Monday afternoon, police said.

Initial police reports said the dead man, identified as Carlos Valenzuela Duran, 52, had been drinking with two men shortly after 2 p.m. when an argument erupted and one of the men opened fire.

Some neighbors said the two men had been drinking and demanded money from Valenzuela. When he refused to give them money, they said, he was shot. One neighbor said Valenzuela had sent her away because the men were becoming rowdy.

Santa Ana police arrested one suspect and were still looking for a second man Monday night who they believe fired the shots. Their names were not immediately released.

Relatives and neighbors said Valenzuela was “ buena gente “--a good guy--whom everyone knew and nobody expected to get into any kind of trouble.

“He worked hard, but he was happy, and he always had a joke,” said Valenzuela’s sister, Elvira Gonzalez, who lives a few houses down the street from the lot where her brother was killed. “He didn’t fight, and he didn’t drink.”

Gonzalez said she was walking along Orange Avenue with her daughter, Donna Gonzalez, when she heard shots. She thought someone was just firing into the air, she said.

“Then we turned the corner and passed by and saw Carlos on the ground,” she said. “I thought, ‘How strange,’ and then I saw his arms out like this, and I saw that he was dying.”

Paramedics were called to the scene but were unable to revive him.

Children on their way home from school gawked at the body lying under a yellow sheet in a lot beside Robles Market, where Valenzuela did most of his automotive work. Old women peeked over fences and out of windows at the crowd, held back by police.

One woman drove up in an old Cadillac and, looking horrified, asked what had happened. “Tiraron a Valenzuela!”-- “They shot Valenzuela!”--said Veronica Hutchinson, whose family owns the lot where Valenzuela worked and died.

“I had barely finished talking to him,” Hutchinson, 31, said. “He was working on my car, and I told him I’d give him a ride to get parts if he needed anything. Then he told me to go inside because of those men. They were loud and very drunk.”

A few minutes later, she heard the shots, Hutchinson said. According to police, at least five were fired from a 9-millimeter semiautomatic handgun, striking Valenzuela in the abdomen, arm and face.

“He was such a good guy,” Hutchinson said. “All the neighborhood knew him.”

Valenzuela’s sister said he had come to the southeast Santa Ana neighborhood from the Mexican state of Chihuahua about 13 years ago and scratched out a living as a mechanic, working independently and without a garage.

He separated from his wife about four years ago, she said, but kept in touch with his seven children, the oldest of whom, Carlos Valenzuela Bonilla (“about 29,” Gonzalez said), is in the military.

Valenzuela washed and ate in her house and sometimes slept there, Gonzalez said. But many nights he would sleep in the car he was so proud of--the shiny black 1958 Chevrolet sedan. “He owned two cars,” Gonzalez said, “and he was afraid somebody would steal them.”

Valenzuela’s Chevy was still there, a few feet away from his body. So was Hutchinson’s red Karmann Ghia, its engine compartment still open and lined with the barrio mechanic’s greasy red rags.