Family Welcomed a Stranger, and Tragedy Was Close Behind

Standing in the driveway of the yellow stucco house the family shared, Rosalba Martinez’s two sisters and three brothers talked about the mysterious young man who entered the tightknit family’s life last Thanksgiving.

Sister Dalila remembered that Rosalba was in a buoyant mood the morning of her death. “I’ll be so beautiful when we get married,” she confided to her 28-year-old sister, as they shopped for a wedding dress.

“She really loved Gustavo,” Dalila said Monday night outside the family home in Fullerton. “He said he loved her almost too much. We knew so little about him.”

The last the family saw of Rosalba Martinez was when she climbed into her fiance’s yellow Camaro at 6:30 on Saturday night for a dinner date to celebrate her 25th birthday. She promised her parents to be home by the usual 10:30 p.m.

Police are not sure what happened during the next 2 1/2 hours. But about 9 p.m., Gustavo Tafolla Suarez, 21, apparently pulled a Smith & Wesson revolver on his fiancee of three months and shot her in the head as the couple sped along the Riverside Freeway. He then turned the gun on himself.

The Camaro ran off the freeway and up an embankment at the Lakeview Avenue exit. Police found the couple dead, the revolver beneath Suarez’s slumped body.

Police are calling it a murder-suicide.

Monday night, friends crowded the family’s living room to console Rosalba’s parents, Lucino and Maria Martinez, a hard-working immigrant couple who came to the United States five years ago from Mexico.

Rosalba Martinez, along with her oldest brother, Hazal, 33, were the first in the family to come up to the United States from their native Michoacan, Mexico, in 1974. She worked during the days to save money and went to school at night, Hazal Martinez said.

Together, they saved enough to pay for the rest of the family to join them in a small Anaheim apartment. In July, the family moved to Fullerton.

For the last three years, Rosalba worked as a dental assistant in Anaheim. On weekends she helped take care of the family, running errands, cleaning and cooking.

“She was the special lady in our home,” Hazal Martinez said. “She was better than all of us, that’s why everyone misses her so.”

The brothers and sisters described her fiance, Suarez, as a shy, quiet young man, with no family but a cousin somewhere in California and a mother still living in Mexico. No one knew the name of the Huntington Beach restaurant where he said he worked as a cook.

“They didn’t have any problems,” Hazal Martinez said, shaking his head. “What happened, we don’t have any explanation.”

The couple met at a Santa Ana dance nine months ago and had dated every Saturday and Sunday night since. They planned to be married in about three months.

“He was the first and only man she loved,” Dalila Martinez said. “She was only seeing him.”

Suarez, however, was very possessive. “He was very jealous,” Dalila Martinez said. “She had to explain everything she did to him. He’d even want to know when she saw her women friends.”

Aside from his shyness, Suarez was liked by the family, the brothers and sisters said. “Still, no one really talked to him,” said Ephraim Martinez, 29. “He was so quiet. You had to ask him questions; he didn’t say much.”

“I think he’s a good guy,” Hazal Martinez said, interrupting his brother. “We don’t know for sure how it happened. Maybe someone else shot them. We don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Ephraim Martinez said he was the first one in the family to learn of his sister’s death. When he saw the police car lights flashing in the driveway Saturday night, he walked outside with a bad feeling that something was wrong.

Initially, he said, he told his mother that Rosalba Martinez was hurt seriously in an accident. “I told her the rest, bit by bit,” he said. “She is a nervous person. I was afraid for her.”

Then, he frowned and said: “Tell people they should know who their sister goes out with. They should know him. They should know everything about him.”