Drugs Led Him Astray, Family Says : Shooting: Gregory Alan Rosenberger had never been in serious trouble with the law, until he got involved in drugs. Then, things turned sour.

He was a personable young man from an upper-middle-class family in Brea. He attended Brea High School, got married and served a stint in the Army.

But somewhere along the way, Gregory Alan Rosenberger began to drift in life, family members said Wednesday. Despite working sporadically in the family garage-door business and occasionally enjoying such sports as rock climbing, the 24-year-old never settled into a steady job.

His uncle described him as “a sweet, loving kid who got messed up with drugs.”

The Orange County district attorney’s office and police said they were continuing their investigations Wednesday into the death of Rosenberger, shot to death early Tuesday by an Anaheim police officer. Police say Rosenberger tried to make a drug deal and then tried to elude and fight two officers in a foggy, dark residential area.

Loren DuChesne, chief investigator for the Orange County district attorney’s office, said the final report will take weeks to complete. An autopsy was performed on Rosenberger on Tuesday, which concluded that he died from several bullet wounds in the chest. The results of toxicological and other tests were still pending.

Anaheim Police Lt. Marc Hedgpeth said that the two officers involved in the incident, whom he refused to name, were on paid administrative leave as part of standard departmental procedure. Also as part of procedure, the officers met Tuesday with a psychologist to talk about the shooting, Hedgpeth said.

Hedgpeth said that although Rosenberger had drugs in his possession at the time of his death, he apparently had obtained them sometime before the incident that sparked the chase, fight and shooting.

Officers tried to question Rosenberger about 1:30 a.m. Tuesday near some apartment buildings in the 700 block of West Hall Avenue, thinking at the time he might have been involved in a drug deal, police said.

Rosenberger started running, and the officers chased him. The man climbed into the back yard of a house on Ralston Street. There, he allegedly tried to grab one of the officer’s pistols out of its holster, police said. When Rosenberger lunged again, an officer shot and killed him.

But a witness watching from inside the house told a different story. He said he clearly saw both officers hit Rosenberger with their night sticks. The man fell to the ground, and the officers shot him after one said they believed he had a weapon.

Rosenberger’s uncle, who declined to give his name, said the family had no immediate reaction to the conflicting accounts.

“Right now, everyone is just upset. We’re not going to be pointing fingers at the cops,” he said. “The last thing we want . . . is pointing the finger and causing a lot of trouble.”

Rosenberger had never been in serious trouble, with only a few traffic tickets and similar minor brushes with the law on his record, his uncle said. But somewhere along the line, Rosenberger’s life had begun to go sour.

“If anything did it, it was the drugs. Not just (Tuesday) night, but over a period of a couple of years. This is happening to thousands of people across the country,” the uncle said.

Keith Rosenberger said he and Gregory, his younger brother, were close and talked often. Gregory Rosenberger, who was one of three boys and two girls, spent two years in the Army working on a construction crew in West Germany, Keith Rosenberger said. He married before going overseas, but the union later dissolved.

Keith said his brother was “a good kid, he had some problems. . . . I did everything I could for him. He just couldn’t find himself.”