Landlord Says Fear Prompted Shooting : Dispute: Laimonis Dzidrums says concern over gangs and retribution prompted him to wait nearly seven hours before telling police that he killed tenant.

A landlord who fatally shot one of his tenants, apparently in self-defense, and then waited almost seven hours to notify police said Friday that his actions were motivated by fear of gangs and retribution by tenants.

“Our apartment has been attacked so many times it’s not even funny,” said the landlord, Laimonis Dzidrums, offering to display bullet holes in the building at 1124 W. Highland St.

Dzidrums, who owns six apartment buildings in central Orange County, said he slept with a gun by his side on the floor of the living room in the boarded-up apartment where the tenants had been forcibly evicted by a court marshal hours earlier.

“You want to protect your place,” he said, explaining that after a two-month eviction battle, he believed that the tenants would try to sneak back into the apartment if he left.

While the evicted tenants camped out in their van and at a friend’s house down the street, a tenant in another apartment, Mike Rodriguez, broke into the evicted tenants’ apartment about 2 a.m. Thursday, apparently to retrieve some papers and supplies for his evicted friends. Dzidrums shot Rodriguez, 25, once in the side, and Rodriguez was dead when Dzidrums notified police about 9:15 a.m.

“I didn’t have time to think about anything,” Dzidrums said Friday. “You don’t see anything at night. You don’t question somebody at that time of night, in that place, under those conditions. I was basically afraid someone else would come afterward.”

Dzidrums said he was afraid to leave the apartment, which does not have a telephone, until someone came to pick him up the next morning. The evicted tenants said Friday that they saw Dzidrums’ wife, Connie, stop by the apartment about 6 a.m. Thursday, but Dzidrums vehemently denied that.

Dzidrums filed an eviction suit July 1 against Mario Juarez and Cristina Sanchez, who had lived in the three-bedroom apartment with their five children since April, 1991, court documents show. The tenants contested the eviction, but in a trial July 24, Dzidrums won and a marshal on July 28 served a five-day notice for the tenants to vacate the property.

In August, however, Ruben Ramirez filed a third-party claim, stating that he was living in the apartment under an oral agreement with the renters. Dzidrums won again in court Aug. 11, but before the marshal could serve another eviction notice, the tenants filed for bankruptcy in federal court.

The bankruptcy claim was denied Aug. 25, and Wednesday, about 4 p.m., a marshal arrived at the property to enforce the eviction.

The apartment’s monthly rent was $1,200. Dzidrums said he has not collected any money since May, but the tenants said they had an agreement to pay in installments.

“We’ve been looking for work,” said Ramirez, a house painter like Juarez and Rodriguez. “We don’t have no place to work to pay the rent. We don’t have no money to get another place.”

Jaurez and Ramirez said in interviews Friday that they have a document stating that they could stay in the apartment until Sept. 14, and that Rodriguez entered the apartment in search of that document. Santa Ana police said they have not found such a document, and records at the courthouse and marshal’s office indicate that the eviction was to be completed Sept. 2.

Further complicating the case is a butcher knife police found near the body Thursday morning. Santa Ana Lt. Bob Helton said Friday detectives had still not determined whether the knife belonged to Rodriguez or was just lying in the apartment, and Dzidrums on Friday said he could not remember whether the intruder came in with a knife.

Rosario Escalante, who shared the upstairs apartment with Rodriguez, said Rodriguez went downstairs unarmed.

“He gave me his money, his car keys to make me feel safe. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything,’ ” Escalante said of her boyfriend of eight years. “I tried to convince him not to go in there but he said he’d just go in for a minute, get the paper, and come out. But he never did come out.”

Escalante said she saw Rodriguez, who had been drinking all night, climb onto the roof and try to get into one window, but that she lost sight of him when he went to the front of the building. When Rodriguez failed to return after about 15 minutes, Escalante said, she and Juarez went looking around the neighborhood in a car.

She said she returned to the apartment a short while later, stayed up worrying until 5 a.m., then slept until the police arrived about 9:30.