Exclusive Neighborhood Thrust Into Media Glare

Many residents of Brea’s Carbon Canyon are private and reclusive, preferring a remote corner of Orange County where gates and call boxes guard the entrances to sprawling, ranch-style estates.

So it was with considerable alarm Thursday that residents awakened to find police cars and TV news vans camped outside the gated entrance to a neighbor’s estate at 6200 Carbon Canyon Road. The response was to the ambush murder of one of the canyon’s more unusual residents, body builder and horse breeder Horace Joseph McKenna.

News of the shooting flashed through the community. Motorists drove by slowly to gawk. Other residents, living near McKenna’s 30-acre Tara Ranch, remained quietly inside.

“As you can tell,” said one woman who refused to talk except through her gate-side call phone, “we are pretty upset.”

Friends and associates of McKenna, 46, rushed to the scene upon hearing the news on the radio.

“This is unreal! I don’t believe this!” cried Angie Null, one of McKenna’s horse trainers, as she hugged another trainer, Dana Sermas.

As the two embraced, TV camera crews rushed across the busy road to record the scene. As they did so, motorists rounding a blind curve braked sharply, tires squealing.

Uniformed police watched stoically, occasionally shaking their heads at the near-collisions on Carbon Canyon Road. Police were positioned at the front entrance to McKenna’s ranch. Behind them stretched yellow police tape marking off the crime scene.

Denied entrance to the ranch until mid-afternoon, Null, Sermas and a third trainer, Ingrid Locken, waited outside with the journalists, answering repeated questions on what they knew about McKenna.

The conversation was interrupted at one point as a detective’s car rumbled down the steep hill leading from McKenna’s hilltop estate and a tall, slender young man emerged from the vehicle. Walking in quick strides to his parked automobile, the man--ashen-faced--denied requests for an interview. He was later identified by the trainers as McKenna’s son.

Several hours later, two plainclothes detectives, on hands and knees, examined evidence at the gate, where the shooting took place.

Seeing two large water trucks approach, spraying down the hillside by the road, one detective ran out to stop the crews, explaining that a police investigation was under way and that the water spray might wash away any footprints or other evidence. The truck drivers shrugged and resumed spraying after they passed the property.

By 2 p.m., the scene outside the ranch gate was deserted except for a Brea police officer left to stand guard. Sitting in a patrol vehicle, he sipped from a water bottle, mopped his brow and tried not to look too bored.

Residents, meanwhile, waited for the canyon to return to normal.