Neighbors Near Slaying Site Used to Gunfire

The stream of humanity from south of the border continued to cross behind Eddie and Betty Cuen’s back yard along Monument Road in San Ysidro on Saturday, a day after their 21-year-old son was arrested on suspicion of killing a 12-year-old Mexican boy with a high-powered rifle from the balcony of the family home.

In groups of 2 or 5 or 10, the aliens scrambled, tripped and ran down the hillside, seemingly oblivious that just 24 hours earlier, one of their youthful compatriots was slain by a single rifle bullet to his head.

On Saturday, Leonard P. Cuen, known as Paul to his friends, was being held without bail in the County Jail downtown on suspicion of murdering Emilio Jiminez Bejinez. The youngster had been standing 350 yards up the hill from Cuen’s home, accompanying three other family members as they stopped to catch their breath before continuing their sprint down the well-beaten path into the United States.

With the crack of the rifle, the youth fell to the dirt. His 22-year-old uncle tried to carry him back across the border into Mexico but gave up as U.S. Border Patrol agents converged on the scene, drawn by the commotion.

At first, all eyes looked for border bandits--armed thugs who hide in the ravines and scrub of the border hills and prey on their own for cash and other possessions. A sheriff’s helicopter flew overhead, police scoured the hillside and neighbors looked inside their outbuildings and garages to see if anyone was hiding.

But a witness--another Latino who was sharing the hillside--said he saw two men standing on the second-floor balcony of a brown house, and that one of them had a gun.

San Diego police went to the house, in the 2400 block of Monument Road, questioned Paul Cuen and by evening had booked him into custody.

The reason for the shooting was unknown, but there was no evidence that it was racially motivated, Police Department spokesman Bill Robinson said.

But neighbors speculated, and others complained, that gunfire had been coming from the Cuen home all day Friday.

They said Paul Cuen had grown increasingly irritated by the aliens who brazenly paraded down the hillside past the two-story house, where his parents have lived for some 20 years. Cuen’s irritability worsened, said one neighbor, after his twin brother, David, was killed in a motorcycle accident a couple of years ago. The tolerance he shared with other neighbors toward the migrants began to sour, neighbors said.

“They liked to scare them,” Elizabeth Rex, one of the neighborhood kids who lives a couple of doors down from the Cuens, said of Paul Cuen and a friend. “They’d throw firecrackers--teeny-weeny little bombs--at them as they ran by. They’d throw other stuff at them, too.” Sometimes, she said, Cuen and the migrants would shout back and forth, taunting one another.

Another neighbor, John Ferrari, spent Friday at the home he and a friend own next door to the Cuens. He said he was annoyed, as he always was, by the gunfire coming from the house.

“I got here about 10:30 Friday morning, and I heard the first gunfire about 10:45,” he said. “I hollered at them to stop. I said, ‘You son of a bitch, knock it off! You’re crazy!’ It was scaring the horses, and one of them kicked his way out of the corral.”

Ferrari said he couldn’t see who was doing the firing because of thick shrubbery between his corrals and the Cuen home. “But you could hear them firing off and on, all day Friday.”

Ferrari and his partner, Tony Minniti, said gunfire from the house was not uncommon and that it apparently came from target practice at bottles set up in the back yard.

But Friday, Ferrari said, he heard a more distinctive sound--that of a high-powered rifle, at first in the morning and again later in the afternoon.

Minniti said he arrived at the house about 4 p.m. Friday, after the youth had been shot and just as law enforcement officers were scouring the neighborhood. “I pulled up into my driveway just as a Border Patrol agent did, and we both heard another shot. The Border Patrol guy even drew his own weapon. He thought it was a border bandit.”

Within minutes, police arrived at the Cuen home and took the 21-year-old into custody without incident.

People at the Cuen home refused comment Saturday.

While Ferrari and Minniti complained about the gunfire spooking the horses, other neighbors said they were not bothered by gunfire.

“I target-shoot myself,” said Jeff Leigh, who lives next door to the Cuens. “They’re nice people. They don’t bother me.”

Border Patrol officials say they had not received previous reports of gunfire coming from any of the homes along Monument Road, a rural, equestrian neighborhood between Interstate 5 and the ocean.

“We hear gunfire pretty regularly,” said Border Patrol spokesman Ted Swofford, “but we’re usually too far away to tell where it’s coming from. And there had been no citizen reports of shots coming from that particular house.

“Usually, our first assumption is that gunfire comes from the border bandits.”