Police Seek Identities of 2 Men Found Dead in Motel in Oxnard : Crime: The victims’ throats had been slashed. The homicides are the latest in a string of killings that have occurred in the city and in Port Hueneme.

Oxnard police on Friday were trying to determine the identities of two men who were found dead in a low-budget motel, their throats slashed.

The grisly discovery marked the latest in a string of violent crimes that have gripped the Oxnard area in recent days. Six homicides have occurred in Oxnard and its neighboring city, Port Hueneme, in an eight-day period.

“It seems like violent crime always picks up in the last six months of the year,” said Lt. Joe Munoz of the Oxnard Police Department. “It just steadily increases. But these past few days have been worse than usual.”

Oxnard police were called to the Flamingo Motel at 421 N. Oxnard Blvd. about 11 a.m. by a manager who discovered the bodies lying on the floor of Room No. 3. Homicide investigators found no identification on either of the bodies and their personal property was missing, indicating that robbery may have been involved in the crime, Lt. Tom Cady said.

Both appeared to be in their late 20s, Cady said, and apparently died from the neck wounds. An autopsy will be performed today.

Dunham said police found other evidence of violence in the room where the two men’s bodies were found Friday, but declined to give details. Police did not disclose what type of weapon was used to slit the men’s throats.

The wounds suggested that the homicides were not a professional killing, Deputy Coroner Craig Stevens said.

The Flamingo’s day manager said she went to the $36-a-night room at 11 a.m. because it was check-out time and the guests had not yet signed out. She pushed in the unlocked door after nobody answered her knock, and found the bodies, said the manager, who asked not to be identified.

The room was disheveled as if there had been a fight, she said.

Guests on either side of the room and the night manager did not report hearing any disturbance, she said.

“They all checked out, but they didn’t mention anything.”

Police and the manager would not say to whom the room was registered.

The string of homicides began Nov. 27, when the body of 33-year-old Ramiro Mendoza was found crouched in a closet in his Port Hueneme apartment, dead from multiple gunshot wounds. No arrests have been made.

On Monday, 43-year-old Oxnard resident Walter Reed Bell was shot to death outside an Oxnard condominium by his stepson, police said. The youth, 17, was distraught over the earlier suicide of his mother and thought his stepfather was responsible for her death, the juvenile’s attorney has said.

A Santa Barbara landlord was shot to death Tuesday by a group of teen-agers while he sat in his parked truck on a Port Hueneme street, police said. The juveniles apparently were trying to steal rental income that Richard Albert Schell, 55, was collecting from four apartment buildings he owned in Ventura County, including one just a block from where he was shot, police said. There had been no arrests by Friday.

Mark Alan Estrada, 16, of Oxnard, was fatally shot Wednesday by the owner of an Oxnard convenience store he had just robbed, police said. On Friday, the district attorney’s office charged Estrada’s alleged accomplice, a 16-year-old boy from Oxnard, with murder because the death occurred during commission of a crime.

Times staff writer Peggy Y. Lee contributed to this story.