Man Kills Wife, Fails Suicide Try as Son, 4, Watches

A 43-year-old man shot his teen-age wife to death on a Santa Ana sidewalk Friday as their son watched, then placed the gun to his own head and squeezed the trigger, but the weapon didn’t fire.

Arturo Beliz was returning the couple’s 4-year-old son to his estranged wife, Nicolasa Gonzalez, at her sister’s house at 5022 W. Roberts St. when he and his wife began arguing outside, family members said. Beliz took a semiautomatic pistol from his waistband and shot Gonzalez once in the chest, police said. He then placed the gun to his own head, but the weapon did not fire.

As neighbors and family watched, he grabbed the boy and fled in a red Chevrolet Monte Carlo, police said. Police issued an all-county bulletin, and arrested him about an hour later, at 11:20 a.m., at the intersection of Brookhurst Street and La Palma Avenue in Anaheim.

A friend said Gonzalez, 19, and Beliz had lived in Mexico until about a year ago, when she fled from him to Santa Ana, leaving their sons, 2 and 4, with her mother.

In May, she returned for her children, said Rosa Elena Benitez, Gonzalez’s friend.

“She wanted to go get her children. When she went there, he was after her to return, but she did not want to get back together with him,” Benitez said. “When she came back, he was with her, and I know she did not want that.”

The couple got an apartment in Santa Ana, “and then they began to have problems,” said Benitez, who works at La Costa Restaurant in Garden Grove, where Gonzalez was a waitress and Beliz was a cook. Gonzalez’s sister and brother-in-law own the restaurant, she said.

Recently, Gonzalez and her sons moved into the home of her sister, Purificion Oleta.

Gonzalez “was very afraid” of Beliz, Benitez said. “Just yesterday she said she was very worried about him because he gave her such an awful look and that he was such a jealous man.”

Beliz had wanted the older boy to live with him, Benitez said, but Gonzalez had “told him only for a day, that she wanted him to bring him back the next day. She was worried. “

Friday morning, Gonzalez “was waiting for him to return the child. When she saw him arrive, she went outside. . . . Maybe he had gone there with that intention (of killing her), because he took out his pistol and he killed her,” Benitez said.

The boy was not injured. Beliz was held on suspicion of murder at Orange County Jail.

Benitez said she heard from family members at the house that “the boy cried out, ‘You killed her, you killed her.”