Arrest Ends 2 Days of Tension for Frightened, Edgy Residents : Mood: While law enforcement agencies searched for the suspect in Dana Point post office attack, people in surrounding communities lived in fear of where he might turn up next.

The dog starting barking around 4 a.m. Saturday at the Tifts’ home on Cliff Drive, waking the occupants. This time, it seemed different to Karen Tift.

“It could be him. It could be that guy,” she whispered to her husband.

Cautiously, Tom Tift searched the house and peered out the window before concluding that “that guy”--Mark Richard Hilbun, 38, suspected of shooting one woman just a few hundred feet from the Tifts’ house and killing two others this week--was nowhere to be found.

The Tifts didn’t know it at the time, but the fired mail carrier was already in police custody by then, captured just a few hours earlier up the coast at a Huntington Beach bar. And for people around Orange County, two days of tension had come to a much-awaited close.

“There are so many screwballs out there. Now there’s one less,” Karen Tift said.

Lynn Cipres’ mother woke her up at 7:30 a.m. Saturday, bursting with the news that police had caught the suspect at the Centerfield Sports Bar & Grill--the Huntington Beach pub that Lynn and her husband often walk to from home. The couple could only shake their heads.

“I was going, ‘Man, I could’ve been there,’ ” Ed Cipres, 37, said.

Said Huntington Beach Police Lt. Charles Poe: “It’s nice to be able to stop all the running around. He was terrorizing the whole beach community. . . . There’s a great sense of relief in the law enforcement community because of the arrest. You can feel it.”

For the nearly two days that Hilbun eluded capture in connection with four separate attacks in the Dana Point-Newport Beach area on Thursday, much of the county sat on edge.

Armed guards patrolled the Dana Point post office that had been the scene of two shootings, and employees there were allowed to come to work in casual clothes instead of uniforms as a measure of protection. Other post offices stepped up security as well. U.S. Postmaster General Marvin Runyon canceled a planned Orange County press conference, as aides said he would make a likely “target.”

Some schools in southern Orange County went into a “lock-down” mode, allowing students outside only when necessary. Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach put tight security around a local woman allegedly shot by Hilbun on Cliff Drive Thursday afternoon after she followed him suspecting that he stole some magnetic car signs from her business.

Residents flooded local law enforcement agencies and postal offices with dozens of tips, claiming sightings of Hilbun, his Toyota pickup truck or even the kayak that the suspect had strapped on top of a camper and then later dumped Thursday in Dana Point. But all of them turned out to be false.

And the Grant Boys gun shop in Costa Mesa reported “brisk” sales of weapons in the last several days, a trend that manager Randy Garell thinks may be tied in part to the Hilbun case.

“People were really paying attention to this. It’s just one more straw on the pile. People are very concerned about safety in their homes, in their vehicles, and in their businesses,” he said. “People who live in Orange County used to think they were behind the Orange Curtain, and they were exempt from this stuff. But that’s not true anymore.”

Even as armed guards remained stationed outside the Dana Point post office Saturday, word of the arrest brought palpable sighs of relief to his former co-workers.

“Everyone sounds like they’re real relieved,” said Kevin Manning, 44, a mail carrier in San Clemente who volunteered to help out at Dana Point since the trouble began. “Yesterday (Friday) was a little rough. We were kind of looking over our shoulders.”

Quipped another employee who did not want to give her name: “I think you can see the smiles on our faces.”

Times staff writer Matt Lait and correspondent Willson Cummer contributed to this report.