Man Stabbed in Club’s Parking Lot After Youths Stalk His Van : Crime: Mission Viejo couple and friends looking for a place to dance; are pursued from one nightspot to another. Attack follows exchange of words.

A Mission Viejo man was beaten and stabbed after a carload of young men followed him as he, his wife and friends drove from one nightclub to another, looking for a place to dance, the victim said Saturday.

Doug Haus, 34, a sales representative, was attacked about 11:30 p.m. Friday and was kept overnight in the intensive care unit at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo, a county Sheriff’s Department spokesman said.

Haus was attacked after his group, looking for a place to go dancing, had driven to one nightclub, only to find it closed. As Haus’ party headed for another nightspot about a mile away, a carload of young men who had gathered in the first club’s parking lot followed them, Haus said from his hospital bed before he was released Saturday evening.

When he got out of his minivan in the parking lot of the second nightclub, he was immediately attacked, Haus said.

“It happened so quick, I didn’t even know when I was stabbed,” Haus said.

The knife entered his chest, stopping at the breastbone, hospital officials said. The blade was just an inch away from his heart.

“The attack was not significant. It was a minor stabbing,” Sheriff’s Lt. Larry Richey said.

“No stab wound is minor,” said Dr. Thomas Shaver, trauma director at the hospital, responded. “It was an accident he survived. The intent was surely to kill.”

Haus and his wife, Terry, 33, had gone out to dinner Friday night with two other couples at an Italian restaurant in Laguna Hills. They wanted to go dancing afterward, so all of them went in the Haus minivan to an Asian restaurant-dance club in a small mall near Muirlands Boulevard and Ridge Route Drive, Terry Haus said.

When they arrived, they could see from the van that the club was closed and decided to go instead to the Hot Rod near Lake Forest Drive and Rockfield Boulevard, she said. It is a posh restaurant and nightclub formerly called the Hop.

Terry Haus was driving. As they headed out of the first club’s parking lot, one of their friends commented on a crowd of about 30 youths milling about in the dark, otherwise-empty lot. Almost 15 cars were parked nearby, she said.

“They seemed to be in their late teens or early 20s,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. They shouldn’t have been around. Why weren’t the police there?”

Lt. Richey said that Haus was intoxicated and that there was a confrontation between him and the youths in the first parking lot.

Both Terry and Doug Haus, however, insisted that there was no confrontation.

As the minivan waited to turn right onto Ridge Route Drive, Terry Haus spotted about four young men approaching them in a car. While they were still about 500 feet away, she drove off and thought the strange episode was over, she said.

But when she looked in her rearview mirror, she spotted the late-1980s Buick Regal trailing them.

By the time she reached the second club, her nervousness had grown. The large, silver car was still behind them. When she spotted an empty Sheriff’s Department car near the club, she parked a few spaces beside it and jumped out, hoping to find a deputy, she said.

Her husband and a woman passenger got out of the van from the other side, she said.

The driver who followed them parked about 20 feet away. Suddenly, the doors flew open and three men marched toward them, she said. Their hands were clenched into fists, and they were wearing thick, black, ski-type gloves, she said.

“I was scared. I was downright scared,” Terry Haus said. “I kept thinking about guns and getting shot. I started screaming, telling (her husband and friend) to get back inside.”

As the men approached, Doug Haus said, he asked them why they had followed.

“I can’t remember what I said exactly,” he said. “Remarks passed between us.”

When the young men reached him, one of them--dressed in gray jeans and a light-colored, long-sleeved sweat shirt--punched him in the face, knocking him against the van, Terry Haus said.

The attacker was about 5 feet, 10 inches, of medium build and appeared to be in his early 20s, Doug Haus said.

As soon as Haus was hit, the three men raced off across the parking lot and apparently later joined companions waiting in their car, Doug Haus said.

It was only then that he realized that he had been stabbed.

“Blood was soaking his shirt, and I thought his nose was bleeding,” his wife added.

He and wife were shaken by the incident. “I stay home and don’t work, to be there for my kids, even though we really can’t afford it,” Terry Haus said.

“I participate at their schools and do other things, because I want my children to grow up OK. I can’t believe that something like this can happen in our neighborhood.”

The assailants remain at large.