Police Sift Clues in Search for 5 Men Who Fled Downey Shoot-Out

The search for five gunmen involved in a fierce gun battle at a Downey discount store that left two police officers wounded shifted Wednesday from streets to meeting rooms, where authorities studied evidence they hope will lead to arrests.

The heavily armed would-be robbers--who eluded a massive manhunt after the pre-dawn shoot-out at the PACE Membership Warehouse on Tuesday morning--left three assault rifles, flak jackets and $46,000 taken from a warehouse safe along the nearby Santa Ana Freeway, authorities said.

They also abandoned two getaway vehicles splattered with blood, which authorities believe indicates that at least one man was wounded. The vehicles were being examined for fingerprints.

“They may have dropped everything they had to escape with their lives,” Downey Police Capt. Dennis Chelstrom said. “Now, we are piecing everything we have together and following every angle we can think of.”

Assisting Downey police were investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

“The police and sheriff’s investigators are trying to see if this case is similar to robberies in other areas,” Chelstrom said. “The ATF investigators are tracing the serial numbers on the firearms.”

One suspect, Samuel Tim Fountain, 33, of Compton, a prison parolee, was arrested Tuesday morning after officers found him hiding in a brushy area near the junction of the Santa Ana and San Gabriel River freeways.

“We’ve got one strike against us,” Chelstrom said. “He doesn’t want to talk.”

Meanwhile, area hospitals were put on alert for the man believed to have been critically wounded when the gunmen exchanged 60 rounds with police in a less than 20 seconds.

The two wounded Downey officers remained hospitalized in stable condition Wednesday. Officer Randy Ewing, 36, was recovering from surgery for four gunshots to the lower back, Chelstrom said. Officer Joel Willis, 22, was recovering from a single gunshot to the back of his right leg.

The gunfire erupted shortly after Ewing and Willis answered a robbery-in-progress call and saw armed men wearing ski masks and clutching two-way radios inside the store, their guns trained on 16 employees who had been forced to lie on the floor.

Three others, acting as lookouts, opened fire on the officers from a van parked nearby and then sped away. The robbers inside fled through a rear door.

A state Department of Corrections official said the brash and well-planned assault on the PACE store did not match Fountain’s criminal record of “strong-arming people in the street.”

“He has a lot of prior robbery convictions,” said Jerry DiMaggio, regional administrator for the department. “But this was something very well organized, and that has not been his history.”

Fountain, who has been in and out of prison since he was 19, was paroled from Folsom State Prison in May after serving time for manslaughter, Chelstrom said.

“When he came out of prison this time, it seemed to me he’d changed a lot,” Fountain’s mother, Ethel, 60, said. “He seemed more mature, like boy turned into a man.”

Although he “wanted to do the right thing this time,” the woman said she was overcome with anxiety when he failed to return home after midnight Tuesday.

“I had a dream that someone was calling me; I woke up and stood at the window all night long,” she said. “It’s hard when you have a child in trouble and you love him.”