Tip Leads to Arrest in Cyclist’s Hit-Run Death

Aided by an anonymous telephone tip, Anaheim police Wednesday arrested a 46-year-old man on suspicion of the hit-and-run death of a motorcyclist two weeks ago.

Police received hundreds of telephone calls from the public after they announced last week that their only clue was a parking sticker on a shard of glass believed to have broken free from the vehicle that hit 20-year-old Christopher Lee Gruber at Crescent Avenue and Dale Street at the Buena Park-Anaheim border.

Booked on suspicion of felony hit-and-run was Ebodio Luna Nino, 46, of Anaheim, Police Sgt. Richard Zschoche said. Bail was set at $10,000.

“The department wishes to thank the media and the public for its help,” Zschoche said. But investigators still need anyone who may have witnessed the collision to telephone authorities at (714) 999-1861, he added.

Gruber’s friends expressed relief Wednesday that a suspect was in custody.

“Nothing is going to bring Chris back and that’s all I want, but seeing that justice is done will make me feel much much better--seeing he (the suspect) gets what he deserves,” said Gruber’s girlfriend, Genny Quenzler, 18, counter girl at Little Caesar’s pizza in Buena Park, where Gruber, a Costa Mesa resident, was a manager.

Gruber “was really nice . . . the easiest person to get along with that I’ve ever known in my whole life,” Quenzler said.

“He always had fun and it just didn’t seem real that he could be just laying there and not moving and not alive,” she said of her hospital visit to the unconscious Gruber, who was pronounced dead hours after the accident.

Jay Padilla, 16, another employee at the pizza restaurant where Gruber had worked since he was a 17-year-old student at La Quinta High School in Westminster, said customers were “pretty excited” about news Wednesday that a suspect had been apprehended.

“I was real close to him,” Padilla said. “Everybody is relieved here.”

Flyers offering a $2,000 reward from Gruber’s parents had been passed out at the restaurant, he said. They carry a reproduction of a newspaper article and a photograph of the parking sticker.

Police asked the public’s help last week in identifying the parking sticker. Newspapers ran photographs of the sticker and police were flooded with calls, Police Sgt. Jim George said.

George could not say Wednesday whether the publication of the parking sticker by newspapers had led directly to the arrest.

However, hundreds of calls were received from the public concerning apartment complexes issuing such stickers, he said.

“Information from a caller who wished to remain anonymous led investigators to an apartment complex in West Anaheim,” Zschoche said. “At this complex, the vehicle involved was located and the suspect contacted.”

The fact that there apparently were no witnesses is puzzling to police, even though the fatal accident happened after midnight, because Dale Street is heavily traveled.

“I can’t comprehend it,” the dead man’s father, Fred Gruber, said last week. “We’re so sick of such violence. I can’t understand why somebody would run over him and then not help him.”

Fred Gruber and the victim’s mother, Golda Gruber, who live in Las Vegas, said their son had planned to take draftsman courses when he wasn’t working at the restaurant.