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Suicide Victim Had Been Stabbing Victim : Tragedy: William J. Gaulvan was seriously wounded in an attack last year that left his companion dead.

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

An unemployed man who fatally shot himself after an apparent attempt to kill his family was a stabbing victim in a vicious assault last year that left a companion dead and him seriously wounded, police officials said Monday.

However, the family of William J. Gaulvan, 27, said they saw no link between the June 25, 1989, attack and the incident Saturday morning in which authorities negotiated in vain with Gaulvan for six hours after he barricaded himself in the family’s house and threatened suicide. They also disputed police statements that Gaulvan tried to kill other family members.

“Why he did what he did only he knows,” said Sylvia Garcia, a friend of the family.

Anaheim police said Gaulvan shot himself once in the head, ending a six-hour standoff that began before dawn when authorities were summoned to the family home in the 500 block of South Grove Avenue to investigate a strong odor of gas, apparently coming from the kitchen stove.

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Gaulvan, who also went by the name Arthur Rodriguez Jr., had argued with two relatives the previous night and evidently turned on the gas in retaliation, said Police Lt. Marc Hedgpeth. Police and firefighters evacuated four family members, while Gaulvan refused to leave his mother’s bedroom, where he held a gun to his head and threatened suicide.

Garcia and other friends and relatives denied that there had been any disagreement. Garcia added that if Gaulvan had wanted to kill his family, he could have done it at any time.

“I don’t think he was trying to hurt anybody,” she said. “Apparently, he killed himself because he felt like he was going to get in trouble for some reason. It was at a point where he was either going to give in to the police or he was going to take his life. He chose to take his life.”

Gaulvan had been unemployed for several months and was concentrating much of his energy on lifting weights and working out at a nearby gymnasium, family members said.

Both they and police said he did not have a criminal record.

“He didn’t take drugs, he didn’t womanize, and he wasn’t a drinker,” said a sister who asked not to be named.

Last summer, Gaulvan nearly died when he and a companion, Vernon Morris Carter III, 17, of Fullerton, were beaten and stabbed as they attempted to buy marijuana from four young men on a residential street in Fullerton, according to police.

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Carter died from the stab wounds he received in the attack, while Gaulvan--stabbed in the back--was hospitalized with a punctured lung.

“I thought I was going to die,” Gaulvan said in a statement to a private investigator retained afterward by Carter’s family. “I thought I was stabbed bad enough that I was just going to lay there and die.”

Four young men were questioned and released in the case. Arrest warrants have since been issued for a juvenile, wanted for the assault on Gaulvan, and an adult, Juan Manuel Lopez, 19, who is charged with Carter’s murder. Those two suspects remained at large Monday.

Fullerton Police Detective Greg Mayes, who investigated the stabbings, recalled that Gaulvan was stabbed by his own knife after his assailants disarmed him during a fight. Mayes said the fight apparently broke out when the four young men took Gaulvan and Carter to a deserted street for the marijuana transaction and then tried to rob them.

Gaulvan, in his statement to the private investigator, denied that he and Carter had been trying to buy marijuana.

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