5 Heavily Armed Robbers Escape in Store Shoot-Out : Crime: Two officers are wounded and a suspect is arrested. Manhunt closes the Santa Ana Freeway.

A “very sophisticated” robbery attempt at a Downey discount store erupted Tuesday into a fierce gun battle between police and heavily armed intruders, who wounded two officers, abducted a commuter and prompted a manhunt that temporarily closed the Santa Ana Freeway.

Five of the six men suspected in the foiled robbery and shoot-out were still at large, police said, and the search was ongoing.

The crime scene stretched from Downey five miles to Norwalk, where the kidnaped commuter imprisoned in his car trunk managed to force it open with a pair of pliers and hurtle out of the moving vehicle, tumbling to the ground in front of the town’s City Hall.

The assailants--part of a six-member gang of armed robbers who wore bulletproof vests, communicated on two-way radios and toted a small arsenal of semiautomatic assault rifles--left their guns and thousands of dollars behind in their haste to escape the pre-dawn shoot-out, police said.

“They were very sophisticated, prepared to pull off their robbery and not let anything stop them,” said Downey Police Capt. Rick Nathan.

One man was arrested Tuesday morning by police officers searching thick brush alongside the Santa Ana Freeway. He was identified as Samuel Tim Fountain, 33, of Compton, who was recently paroled from prison after serving time for murder, robbery and assault convictions.

Police shut down the northbound and southbound lanes of the freeway shortly after 8 a.m. and searched for about an hour for the robbers, who operated in two teams of three. Helicopters hovered while officers searched the freeway corridor and the bed of the San Gabriel River.

The southbound lanes of the freeway were again closed at 2:30 p.m. for another fruitless search that lasted a half hour.

The two wounded police officers were taken by ambulance to Downey Community Hospital. Officer Randy Ewing, 36, was shot four times in the buttocks. Officer Joel Willis, 22, was shot once in the back of his right leg; a second bullet lodged in his bulletproof jacket, just over his heart. Both men, each of whom had been on the force for one year, were listed in stable condition.

Fountain was being held in connection “with this crime and he is being booked on attempted murder of an officer,” Nathan said.

According to Downey police and Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials, the incident began shortly after 5 a.m. at the PACE Membership Warehouse, a windowless, low-slung stucco structure on Florence Avenue near the junction of the Santa Ana and San Gabriel River freeways.

Patrick Smid, vice president of marketing for PACE, said that at least three gunmen were waiting inside the warehouse when a manager opened the doors to let in 16 stock workers, receiving clerks and other employees. A second manager entered shortly afterward and tried to escape, but was herded back into the store by a trio of armed men who drove up in a white van that had been “sitting in the parking lot, basically on watch,” Smid said.

All 18 employees were ordered to lie on the floor. Nathan said at least one was slightly hurt when struck in the face with a rifle butt. The gunmen forced one worker to open a vault, Smid said.

Police believe that the armed robbers, all wearing dark ski masks, entered the warehouse from the roof, chopping through a section of the ceiling with an ax.

“It looks like a planned, well-thought-out robbery,” said Downey Police Chief Clayton Mayes.

Smid said one employee managed to summon police, but he declined to describe how authorities were contacted.

At about 5:07 a.m., the first two police officers--Ewing and Willis--arrived at the front of the building. As they peered into a pair of sliding glass doors, Nathan said, they saw a group of masked men moving about, clutching rifles and speaking into portable radios.

Moments later, police said, the two officers were fired upon by gunmen in the white van. As the officers fell, several other officers, summoned as backup, arrived. Crouching behind their cars, they returned fire. More than 60 rounds of ammunition sliced through the darkness.

“There was more firepower there than I’ve ever seen in my 27-year career in law enforcement,” Mayes said. “They outgunned and outnumbered us.”

Bullets pitted the white exterior of the warehouse. At least seven shots pierced the white van as it accelerated out of the parking lot and sped west on Florence Avenue. When police found the van several hours later, they discovered pools of blood in its rear compartment.

“We have every reason to believe one of the suspects was critically wounded,” Mayes said.

Amid the chaos, the robbers in the rear of the warehouse shot off a lock on a back door and fled on foot toward the freeways. They left behind two AK-47 assault rifles and a Mini 14 semiautomatic weapon, three bulletproof vests and a mound of cash, police said.

Moments after speeding away from the PACE parking lot, the gunmen in the white van drove into a residential neighborhood in Santa Fe Springs. Still wearing ski masks, the robbers confronted Jesus Rangel, a 34-year-old father of four, as he left home about 5:30 a.m. for work.

Rangel later told The Times that he felt a chill of suspicion as he saw three men, wearing stocking caps, standing near his brown 1977 Oldsmobile sedan.

“I didn’t finish putting the key in the switch when they opened the door of the car,” Rangel said. “They put a machine gun on me.”

The gunmen forced Rangel into the trunk and drove away.

Rangel feared that when his abductors reached their destination they would kill him, and he began trying to open the latch with his hand. He remembered a tool box in the trunk and aided by a dangling tail light, felt for a pair of pliers.

“One time the pliers slipped and hit the trunk lid and they yelled at me,” Rangel said. “I worked more slowly so they wouldn’t hear me.”

He succeeded in unlatching the trunk, but the car was moving too fast for him to jump out until his abductors stopped at a traffic light. When the car lurched forward, Rangel said he leaped out, falling to the ground and scrambling away.

“I ran as much as I could,” said Rangel, who had recently sprained an ankle in a soccer game. “I thought they were going to fire at me. But, no, and they didn’t come back.”

Rangel said he tried to flag down a bus driver and yelled and whistled at a passing sheriff’s car without success. He finally found a telephone and called friends to pick him up.

“They (deputies) told me if I didn’t escape they would have killed me,” Rangel said. “They were running and they wanted a car. Who knows?”

Rangel said it was too dark for him to get a description of his abductors.

In the first hour after the shoot-out, police were uncertain whether intruders were still in the warehouse. At least 30 members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s SWAT team finally burst into the building and made what Nathan decribed as an “aisle by aisle” search, scrambling from vegetable counters to electronics displays until they were certain the gunmen were gone. At the same time, police searched roads and fields nearby, halting morning traffic and finding only Fountain.

Investigators were reviewing other robbery attempts in the Southland for any possible connections to Tuesday’s incident.

Five “takeover” robberies were committed between Aug. 20 and Sept. 4 in the San Fernando Valley. In those attacks, gunmen detained employees and customers of large retail stores and escaped with cash. Police theorized that the incidents in the Valley were related to Tuesday’s crime.

Times staff writers Stephen Braun and John Kendall contributed to this article.