14-Year-Old Fatally Shot at Apartment; Man Sought

Westminster police continued searching Friday for a man wanted in the shooting death of a 14-year-old neighbor.

Aaron Locher, who lived with his mother in an Edwards Street apartment, died at 7:05 p.m. Thursday at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital of gunshot wounds to the chest and stomach.

Officer Bob Amren said the assailant shot the youth at least four times with a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. The shooting happened about 5:30 p.m.

Police described the assailant as Latino, 25 to 30 years old, 5 feet, 7 inches tall, with a thick, black mustache. He was wearing an orange T-shirt and a multicolored headband when the shooting occurred, Amren said.

4 Return to Apartment

The assailant--a resident of the same apartment complex--has fled. Police said his identity is unknown because he has used many aliases.

Amren said no motive for the shooting was known to police. However, two teen-age apartment residents who said they knew Aaron said the shooting resulted from a dispute between them and four older men that began Wednesday at a bowling alley and ended in a fight near the apartment complex.

The four men returned to the front of the Locher apartment Thursday, and Aaron was shot when he and a friend emerged and argued with them, the youths said.

“I heard the shots,” said Jo Collins, a stock clerk who lives in an apartment across from where Aaron lived with his mother. “I heard the first one and thought it was a gun. Then there were three quick shots that sounded like fireworks.”

Soon two girls told Aaron’s mother that her son had been shot, Collins said.

“It’s really sad because Aaron was a good kid,” she said. “He had teen-age problems, but on the whole he was a nice kid, a cute kid. We’re all in a state of shock. It just seems like a nightmare. Poor little guy. It was terrible seeing him lying there on the ground.”

Neighbor Evelyn Douglas said Aaron was “always such a nice boy.”

“He always talked to me nice,” she said. “He rode his skateboard up and down the drive, that’s all he ever did. I don’t know who could do that, who could hurt him.”