Vista

Sheriff’s Department investigators are looking for a 49-year-old man they say is the prime suspect in the shooting death of his son-in-law.

About 10:20 p.m. Wednesday, 31-year-old Vincente Meza Zamora was shot in front of his in-laws’ house in the 500 block of Spires Street in Vista, said Homicide Lt. John Tenwolde.

He died about four hours later at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla.

Zamora and his wife, Barbara, had been separated for about a month and she had been living at the Spires Street address with her parents, Tenwolde said.

Apparently, Zamora was loitering outside the house Wednesday night, but family members ignored him until they heard loud banging noises, Tenwolde said.

Then Zamora’s wife and her parents went outside to see what was going. Barbara Zamora went back inside the house and moments later a shot was fired, Tenwolde said.

Vincente Zamora was found lying in the street next to a farming tool he apparently had used to break the windows of a car parked in the family’s driveway.

Barbara Zamora’s father, 49-year-old Rafael Martinez, fled the scene before deputies arrived and investigators believe he may be armed with a semiautomatic pistol, Tenwolde said.

Martinez, a laborer, is described as about 5-foot-10 and 200 pounds with short, curly, dark brown hair, long sideburns and a mustache.

He left the scene in a 1977 brown Ford pickup, Tenwolde said.