Woman Sought Order to Restrain Her Killer : Crime: Victim who was shot to death in catering truck failed to appear for court date to allege he beat and threatened her with a gun.

A month before she was shot to death in her catering truck, Gwendolyn Antonietta Leon obtained a temporary restraining order against the man who killed her, saying he beat her and threatened her with a gun.

But a permanent restraining order was never issued because Leon did not show up for an April 10 court hearing where a Superior Court commissioner could have ordered her killer, who obeyed a court summons, to stay away from her forever.

After following her almost daily for the last three weeks and harassing her as she made her daily rounds, Leon’s former boyfriend, Arturo Fernandez Martinez, climbed aboard her catering truck and mortally wounded her, before shooting himself to death in the head.

“Today, I told Arturo I was not going to work because of the black eye he gave me,” Leon wrote in documents filed March 23 with Orange County Superior Court. “He grabbed (me) . . . and crashed my face against the refrigerator. He always carries a gun. He pulled the gun and pointed it at my head and told me he was going to kill me,” she wrote.

The 23-year-old Anaheim woman, mother of a 4-year-old girl, wrote in court documents that she and Martinez, a 47-year-old Santa Ana tow truck operator who was married and the father of two, had been living together.

After Martinez shot her Monday morning, he kissed her, paused to glance at disbelieving onlookers, kissed her again, and then put a bullet through his brain.

In seeking court protection, Leon not only wanted Martinez to be ordered to stay away from her and leave her alone, she also wanted the Cuban native placed in a alcohol rehabilitation and anger-management program.

She had complained to co-workers at Super Snacks catering that he had been tailing her for weeks as she drove her route.

Attorney Harry M. Umann, who represented Martinez in the restraining-order case, said his client “was a mild-mannered man who insisted that he had never hurt her.”

Attempts to reach her family Tuesday were unsuccessful.