Slain Family Man Was ‘Daddy’ to 11 Foster Children : Violence: A teen-age neighbor has been arrested in the shooting of Eustaquio Medrano, but the motive remains a mystery.

When Eustaquio Medrano, 49, a groundskeeper at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, failed to show up for work one day last week, it triggered alarm among his co-workers. Medrano always arrived 30 minutes before starting time.

Their fears were well-founded.

On Tuesday afternoon, several dozen of these workers gathered outside the cemetery’s Church of the Recessional to pay their last respects to the quiet man who had trimmed the grass around bronze memorial markers for the past decade. He had been killed by a bullet in the chest.

After the service, they joined Medrano’s family--his wife and a cluster of adopted children, foster children and stepchildren--in a mourners’ procession through the park.

Seven days after Medrano’s death, his friends and family still could not understand the reason. According to Los Angeles police, a teen-age neighbor shot the devoted father in the driveway of his Glassell Park home.

After the shooting, police arrested the neighbor. But they say the youth was not a gang member, and they were still baffled this week about why the man was shot.

His family and friends insist that Medrano, who had cared for as many as 11 foster children at once, would never have become embroiled in a violent dispute.

“Eustaquio would not have argued,” said Eddie Solis, a grounds supervisor at the cemetery. “He’d sooner have walked away.”

His family is puzzled and angry.

“You can accept things when it’s something like a car accident,” said Eva Mejia, 26, Medrano’s stepdaughter. But the shooting, she said, “for no reason. . . . It’s something we cannot accept.”

Such emotions lingered among many of those who attended the funeral at Forest Lawn. The crowd of 300 included uniformed cemetery workers, who were given time off to pay their respects.

“Everybody’s hurt because he was a nice person,” said Jose Cortez of Huntington Park, who worked with Medrano.

After a Catholic service in Spanish at the church, the mourners made their way to a grassy slope. As the procession moved through the grounds, many workers who could not attend the service paused to pay tribute. The mourners circled the grave site and said additional prayers before the casket was lowered.

“Nobody really understands it at all,” Deacon John Coplen said after the graveside service. “The man evidently didn’t have an enemy in the world. He wasn’t the type to get into a fight--on or off the job. It was a senseless, brutal act that affected many lives.”

Los Angeles Police Detective Loren Zimmerman said the shooting occurred just before 5 a.m. on July 31, as Medrano was going through his regular pre-work routine. He had just put his lunch down on the retaining wall outside his beige stucco house in the 3200 block of Carlyle Street and opened the driveway gate.

One of the three brothers who lived next door called to Medrano, asking him if there was work available at Forest Lawn, Zimmerman said. Medrano referred them to the cemetery’s hiring office. Then he was shot once with a handgun, witnesses told police.

Later that day, officers arrested one of the brothers, Sergio Celis, 18, in connection with the shooting. Celis was arraigned Friday on one count of murder. Zimmerman said Celis and his brothers have denied any involvement in the shooting, asserting that they were asleep when it happened.

The investigator said the death of Medrano, the 23rd homicide of the year in Los Angeles Northeast Division, illustrates the increasing violence in the area’s neighborhoods. “People don’t like something, they shoot,” Zimmerman said.

Mejia, Medrano’s stepdaughter, said she suspects the shooting was planned because it happened at the early morning hour when he always left for work. But she cannot figure out a motive, she said, and the neighbors have offered no explanation. “They were actually friends,” Mejia said.

The death has had a great effect on Medrano’s large family. He and his wife, Nori, were caring for two adopted children and six foster children, ages 1 to 14. Nori had been a foster parent for 20 years, and when she married Eustaquio 14 years ago, he agreed to carry on the tradition, Mejia said.

“My mother has always loved children,” said Mejia. “God only gave her me. So she went ahead and raised other children.”

She said her mother hopes to be able to continue caring for the youngsters despite her husband’s death.

In 1990, the Medranos were written about in a Forest Lawn employee publication. At the time they were caring for 11 children. Although the family size has decreased slightly since then, Eustaquio Medrano continued to enjoy taking the children to Verdugo Park to play and to family restaurants each weekend.

“Each one had a story--some were sad and some were happy,” recalled Solis, his Forest Lawn supervisor. “They all called him ‘Daddy.’

“Because of the foster children, he’d always have to go to court hearings, and he’d always ask my permission in advance. The majority of time, he would not be docked because we saw something beautiful in it.”

The evening before the funeral, Deacon Coplen met with Medrano’s family and tried to help them cope with the loss.

“I asked them if they wanted to pray for the people who did this. They said they did,” Coplen said. “I told them it was an act of love.”