3 Drive-By Shootings on Night Man Was Killed : Crime: No one was hurt in the other two incidents. Oxnard police aren’t sure of the role played by gangs.

At least two other drive-by shootings occurred on the night that a Camarillo man was shot to death in La Colonia, Oxnard’s Latino barrio, Oxnard Police Chief Robert Owens said Monday.

The attacks brought the total of drive-by shootings in Oxnard to seven since the beginning of the year, according to police department records.

However, there are “many more” drive-by shootings that are not investigated by Oxnard police because they do not involve deaths, injuries or property damage, said David Keith, a crime analyst for the Oxnard Police Department.

Rufino Ducler, 45, was killed about 5 p.m. on St. Patrick’s Day in a convenience store parking lot near First Street and Rose Avenue. Ducler’s death was the first homicide this year in Ventura County.

Although Owens said the death has not been linked to gang activity, he said the shooting was drug-related and resembles incidents attributed to gang members in other urban areas.

“It’s a gang-style shooting . . . from a moving vehicle,” Owens said. “We have some leads that it might have been involved with drugs.”

But “a drug dealer isn’t necessarily a gang member,” he said.

The second shooting that night occurred three hours after Ducler was shot and took place in the same parking lot. In that incident, the window of a bakery was hit by a bullet.

The third shooting occurred late Saturday, and Owens said it may have been gang-related. It occurred on Napoleon Avenue in a neighborhood where a gang fight erupted a week earlier.

No one was injured when a shot was fired at a house in the 2000 block of Napoleon Avenue. But six men were stabbed at a birthday party at the same house a week earlier after gang members crashed the celebration by jumping over a fence, according to police reports.

Owens said Oxnard has youth gangs but that the city’s gang problem has been exaggerated. The police chief said he has tended to downplay gang activity because it “glorifies these hoodlums and makes them appear like heroic street fighters.”

In addition to the three St. Patrick’s Day shootings, pedestrians, motorists and, in one instance, a Greyhound bus driver have been fired on by gunmen in cars, according to Oxnard police reports.

On Jan. 20, a gunman shot at the Greyhound driver as he was pulling into the bus station on Statham Boulevard. Although no injuries were reported, the bus was damaged slightly.

In February, a 37-year-old driver sitting at an intersection of Gonzales and Ventura roads was slightly wounded after a gunman fired on him from a another vehicle.

Also in February, gunmen driving a black-and-white Cadillac shot at and slightly wounded an 18-year-old youth while he was walking through Colonia Park.

And on March 11, a passenger in a Buick Riviera fired on a 42-year-old motorist as he sat in his car in the 400 block of Glenwood Drive, police said.

“Sometimes you’ll have somebody drive by and shoot a weapon into a home,” said Keith, the crime analyst. “Unless we respond, we don’t take a crime report.”