Brothers Shot, 1 Killed in 2 Gang Attacks : Crime: Police say the incidents in Buena Park may be part of the cycle of violence that claimed the life of another family member in 1989.

Two brothers were shot, one of them fatally, during separate attacks only hours apart this weekend, in what police and family members believe may be a retaliatory cycle of gang-related violence.

Police on Monday were trying to determine if the shootings of half-brothers Richard Diaz Arellano, 23, and Jose Arellano Ventura, 26, both suspected members of a Hawaiian Gardens gang, are linked.

Shortly after midnight Sunday, a 16-year-old boy allegedly shot and killed Richard Arellano of Cypress minutes after he left a party here with his girlfriend, Police Sgt. Terry Branum said. Police arrested the youth and two men on suspicion of murder shortly after the shooting.

At 10 p.m., a gunman leaned from a speeding car and opened fire on Ventura, an Anaheim resident, wounding him in the leg and hip as he walked across a parking lot at a hamburger restaurant on Lincoln Ave. The gunman escaped.

Ventura was shot as he walked with family members and a friend toward a pair of police officers in an unmarked car parked across the street from the restaurant. Ventura was going to tell officers about a black car that had driven past the Arellano home in northern Cypress several times that night, police said.

Ventura was in stable condition Monday at a hospital in the county, a spokeswoman said.

Two men arrested in connection with Richard Arellano’s death--Roel Villamayor, 18, of San Bernardino and Robin Moe, 19, of Anaheim--were held in Orange County Jail in Santa Ana in lieu of $250,000 bail, Branum said. The suspected gunman, a 16-year-old from Buena Park, was being held in Orange County Juvenile Hall, police said.

Police said the shootings, if connected, underline the deadly, retaliatory nature of gang warfare.

“You never know when you will see the end of these things,” Branum said. “They go back and forth” with shootings and other violence.

Arellano family members were shocked by the shootings. “I can’t believe this happened,” said George Arellano, 24, Richard Arellano’s brother.

At home, trying to console each other after the death of Richard Arellano early Sunday, family members heard the pop of gunfire late that night and rushed into the street to see what had happened.

Looking at Ventura on the ground in the parking lot with gunshot wounds, “I thought ‘Not another one, not another one,’ ” George Arellano said Monday.

Alejandro Arellano, 62, shook his head at the memory of both shootings and stared at the parking lot near his home, where one of his six sons lay bleeding just hours before.

“To my knowledge, they were not gang members,” he said of the victims.

“I don’t know that they were in bad with anybody. . . . Maybe they were mistaken for someone else.”

Both brothers were busy with jobs and plans for their future, not gangs, their father insisted. Ventura, married and the father of a 1-year-old boy, had been working in a warehouse in Anaheim for the last two months.

Richard Arellano wanted to attend truck driving school and was planning to marry his girlfriend, whom he had been dating for one year.

Police said Richard Arellano appears to have been targeted early Sunday after an argument with a 16-year-old during a party at a home in the 8300 block of San Clemente Way. Richard Arellano left the party with his girlfriend, and the teen-ager confronted him, police said.

The youth, believed to be from a rival gang, allegedly shot Richard Arellano as he stood a short distance away and continued firing as he lay wounded on the ground, according to police.

Richard Arellano “didn’t hurt anyone. . . . There is no reason for this,” said the victim’s 15-year-old girlfriend, who denied an argument preceded the shooting.

In the other shooting, a gunman in a car shouted obscenities at Ventura and the three people who accompanied him before opening fire, according to a witness and police. A hail of bullets came from a black 1993 Honda, reported stolen from Lakewood, as it sped around a corner onto northbound Hoffman Street from Lincoln Avenue, witnesses and police said.

“They just started shooting away,” said 23-year-old Fabian Arellano. “All of a sudden my cousin gets killed. . . . Then this happens with (another) cousin,” he lamented.

“They were retaliating, but I don’t know why. I don’t know,” he said.

The shootings on Sunday resurrected painful memories of 1989 when a cousin of the victims was killed in a gang-related shooting in Westminster.

Efraim (Frank) Arellano, 19, died five days after he was shot in the head while he drove one Saturday night with a friend on Hoover Street, police and family members said. “The violence continues so strong, so strong,” said Efraim’s father, Manuel Arellano, 56.