FULLERTON : Teen Arrested After Standoff With SWAT

An 18-year-old who allegedly fired a handgun into Lemon Park, then pointed the gun at a neighbor, surrendered to police Sunday after a tense, 4 1/2-hour standoff.

SWAT team officers spent several hours calling to Fernando Gutierrez over a bullhorn and trying to contact him in his home by phone, police and neighbors said.

After more than three hours, “he finally picked up the phone,” Sgt. Geoff Spalding said. “We don’t know why he decided to pick it up. The hostage negotiator talked to him awhile, gave him his options,” and he walked quietly outside and was arrested.

Although there were early reports that a hostage had been taken, Spalding said those turned out to be incorrect.

Gutierrez, a senior at Vista High School, was held at Fullerton Jail on $10,000 bail on suspicion of two felonies: discharging a firearm and aggravated assault for allegedly pointing his gun at a neighbor.

Two dozen officers surrounded Gutierrez’s low-rise, stucco house and evacuated several nearby dwellings in the 300 block of East Rossylnn Avenue early Sunday after a frightened neighbor called police to report that the young man had fired into the park, pointed a gun at him, then retreated into his home.

The neighbor, who asked that his name not be used, said he was about to leave for work at 5:30 Sunday morning when the youth “pointed the gun at me. I ducked behind my truck and called police.”

When police arrived, they took over the neighbor’s house, he said, covering all the windows with blankets, setting up guns in the living room and training them on Gutierrez’s house directly across the street.

Eventually, officers led the neighbor, his wife and four children, ages 7 to 13, out the back gate to a relative’s house up the street, out of the range of danger.

Other neighbors described Gutierrez as “a good kid” who was alone in the house while his parents and 7-year-old sister spent the weekend in Ensenada.

His aunt, Jenny Gutierrez, 55, said police had telephoned her early Sunday and asked her to come to the scene of the shooting but then refused to tell her what happened. Her nephew was “a good kid, but he’s a fanatic about TV and the movies,” she said. The young man was not doing well in school, she noted, but, “we don’t know what happened.”