Brother Held in Slayings of 2 Men

A 25-year-old man was arrested at his parents’ San Bernardino County home Monday afternoon on suspicion of fatally shooting his two older brothers. Their bodies were discovered in their Van Nuys apartment Sunday, Los Angeles police reported.

Marwan Awwad Samarneh was arrested at 1:30 p.m. Monday at the Redlands home, the day after the family’s pastor found the bodies of the two brothers in the apartment, homicide Detective Jim Vojtecky said.

Samarneh still had the handgun police believe he used to kill his brothers, but offered no resistance, Vojtecky said. Samarneh was being held Monday night in the Van Nuys jail on suspicion of murder and is scheduled to be arraigned Thursday in Van Nuys Municipal Court, police said.

Samarneh shared the second-floor apartment in the 6900 block of Kester Avenue with his brothers, Mazen Samarneh, 31, and Maher Samarneh, 32, both self-employed contractors, police said. Both were shot several times.

“We had two of them accounted for, and we felt we had a potential third victim who may have been a kidnap victim or a homicide victim or a suspect,” Vojtecky said. “It had to be one of the three. To our knowledge, drugs is not involved or any other criminal activity that we have discovered. We really don’t know the motive. We had conflicting statements” from the suspect, he said.

At least 10 members of the family, which included three sons and three daughters, immigrated to the United States from Jordan five to eight years ago and live throughout Los Angeles County, police said.

Police believe the brothers were killed some time between Thursday afternoon and Sunday morning, when the pastor discovered the bodies. He had stopped at the apartment to check on the Samarnehs at the request of the brothers’ mother, because she had not heard from her sons in several days, police said.

On Friday, neighbors of the Samarnehs told police that they had heard gunshots in the area, but it was unclear when the shots were heard, police said. Officers went to the apartment house and dislodged a bullet found protruding from the wall of an apartment adjoining the Samarnehs’, keeping it as evidence.

They knocked on the door of the Samarnehs’ apartment, but left after no one answered, according to Lt. Warren Knowles, head of Van Nuys homicide detectives.

The Rev. Solomon Nazzal, pastor of a Highland church, who was consoling the victims’ family at their Redlands home Monday, said the family was upset that officers did not do more to reach the brothers.

“They were very upset that the police . . . didn’t open the door,” Nazzal said. “Maybe at that time, they could have done something.”

Nazzal was not the minister who discovered the bodies.

Lt. Knowles said the time lapse between the reported gunfire and the discovery of the bullet made it unreasonable for the officers to kick down the door, but that “probably the officers could have checked back throughout the night, continuing to knock on the door,” and then asked the manager to open the door.

But even if the officers had entered the apartment, they could not have saved the brothers, Knowles said. “They died almost instantaneously from the gunshot wounds,” he said.

According to the apartment manager, the brothers had lived at the apartment for about a month, and neighbors said they were quiet and rarely seen.

“They looked like very nice people . . . always together,” said one neighbor, who asked not to be identified because she was frightened by the slayings. “I don’t see them with their friends, I don’t see them with women,” she said. “They always go to work, even sometimes Sunday.”

The neighbor reported hearing sounds of fighting--”like an earthquake . . . like breaking wood or something”--coming from the men’s apartment Friday or Saturday morning.