Slayings Overwhelm Port Hueneme Police : Crime: County’s third-smallest city has had five homicides in eight months. Previously, there was just one murder in three years.

On a shelf in the office of Port Hueneme Police Sgt. Fernando Estrella is a row of thick black binders known simply as “homicide books.”

Each binder contains the paper trail of a killing--interviews with suspects, statements from witnesses and a catalogue of physical evidence collected from long-erased crime scenes.

And in a community known as a quiet enclave of retirees, weekend homeowners and Navy Seabees, the growing number of binders marks an extraordinary streak of mayhem that has overwhelmed the police.

“It’s not a matter of sticking a finger in the dyke anymore, it’s a matter of trying to hold back the tsunami ,” Estrella said.

In the past eight months, Port Hueneme--the third-smallest city in Ventura County--has had five unrelated homicides, two of which police consider “whodunits” with no obvious suspects. Prior to that, the city had counted just one murder in three years.

By comparison, Simi Valley, Santa Paula and Fillmore had no homicides during the same time period and Ojai had one. Thousand Oaks and Moorpark each had three homicides and Ventura had four. Oxnard--the county’s largest and most crime-troubled city--had 12.

Port Hueneme City Manager Dick Velthoen, who calls the run of killings in Port Hueneme “unprecedented,” says the killings show that Port Hueneme is not immune to the urban ills found throughout Southern California--”gangs, drugs and aberrant behavior.”

The homicides have added up to an unexpected expense for the cash-strapped city, he said. Reserve funds will probably be used to cover an estimated $70,000 to $80,000 in overtime and other costs associated with the five homicide investigations.

“We’re part of the system,” Velthoen said. “It’s treated us favorably for two or three years, and now I guess it’s just our turn.”

Other Port Hueneme officials say the killings have tarnished Port Hueneme’s reputation as a quieter and calmer community than Oxnard, which borders the smaller city on three sides.

“You tend to stay home and shake in your boots a little bit when things like this go on,” said Port Hueneme City Councilwoman Toni Young.

To bolster the city’s police force and make residents feel safer, Young said she plans to propose a ballot measure that would ask residents to pay for the hiring of five additional officers in addition to paying for basic police services.

“We certainly have felt we’re an island among ourselves as far as safety and comfort,” she said. “I guess we’re more concerned that some of that is spilling over right now.”

But Port Hueneme Sgt. Dennis Fitzgerald said it is too simple to blame the violent streak on Oxnard, which annually leads the county in killings.

“I’m not going to say because of Oxnard we’ve had this problem--that’s not the issue. The issue is, it’s almost like one big city here,” he said.

For Port Hueneme’s department of 20 officers, including the police chief, the killing spree has proved overwhelming. Unlike their counterparts in larger departments, where special squads handle homicides and other violent attacks, Port Hueneme’s detectives tackle the gamut of crime, from graffiti to burglaries to armed robberies.

Now, however, detectives are focused almost exclusively on the three open homicide cases and a drive-by shooting last month that left one youth seriously injured.

“When something like this happens, we drop everything,” Estrella said. “We are forced to put everything on the back burner.”

Even homicides that appear to have little mystery to them take tremendous resources to investigate and are included on the shelf of black binders, he said.

Such was the case in February, when a Port Hueneme liquor store owner shot and killed a knife-wielding shoplifter as he was making off with a bottle of wine, police said.

The district attorney’s office later ruled that Shin Ung Kang was justified in shooting 23-year-old Timothy Morrison of Port Hueneme outside the Anacapa Liquor Market on Port Hueneme Road.

And while detectives say there is no such thing as an easy homicide to investigate, the city’s two most recent killings have proved particularly shocking to residents.

In one, Norma Rodriguez, a 33-year-old mother of two, was found strangled in the living room of her duplex on East B Street on June 1. Three weeks later, Beatrice Bellis, an 87-year-old deaf woman, was stabbed to death in a senior citizens’ apartment complex.

The fatal stabbing left elderly residents of the Mar Vista Apartments on Scott Street feeling vulnerable in a building where they had once felt secure. To help calm their fears, the city has agreed to post a night watchman in the building.

In the Rodriguez case, Estrella said detectives have made more progress. Although no one has been ruled out as a suspect, he said detectives now have a “short list” of five prime suspects.

Described as a devoted mother and quiet neighbor, Rodriguez was not the type of person who would have taken careless risks, leaving herself vulnerable to attack, according to her family and police.

Because of that, detectives suspect her killer was at least an acquaintance.

For Rodriguez’s family, knowing the killer is free has left them with questions that may never be answered.

“I don’t want this to happen to anyone else. Not to another mother, sister, daughter,” said Janie Galindo, one of Rodriguez’s six sisters.

Hoping to turn up new leads in the case, Rodriguez’s six sisters are now planning to blanket south Oxnard and Port Hueneme with flyers that read: “Do you know who murdered my sister Norma?”

Detectives have fewer leads in the Bellis case, which happened less than three blocks from the Port Hueneme police station.

Because there was no sign of forced entry, investigators believe Bellis may have left her door unlocked overnight or let her attacker in. Some property was missing from her one-bedroom apartment, but detectives would not disclose details or confirm that robbery was a motive.

The Ventura County coroner’s office has ordered tests to determine if Bellis was sexually assaulted.

Fitzgerald called the Bellis case a classic “whodunit”--a term for homicides in which there are no witnesses and no obvious suspects or motives.

In those cases, he said, investigators must pore over tedious physical evidence--clothing fibers, hairs, body fluids and the arrangement of a crime scene--in a search for clues.

“You just have to take a dogged, tenacious approach to these cases and not let go,” said Fitzgerald, who investigated Port Hueneme’s serious crimes for a decade.

No less frustrating have been two homicide cases in which Port Hueneme police did make arrests and thought they had put together solid cases.

In one, a Ventura County jury acquitted 16-year-old Gilbert Martinez of murder in the killing of Richard Schell, 52, who was shot in his pickup truck last December after collecting rent from tenants of an apartment building he owns on B Street.

Martinez and three other men were arrested in the killing and botched robbery attempt. During his trial, prosecutors alleged that the 16-year-old fired the fatal shot.

Jurors, however, did not find that Martinez had planned the killing, and instead found him guilty of attempted robbery with the use of a firearm.

“Anybody ever tells you you can’t get away with murder, you tell them you can,” Estrella said. “Because he did, in my opinion.”

In a second case, Port Hueneme police arrested four men in connection with the killing of 33-year-old Ramiro Mendoza, a disabled roofer and alleged drug dealer. He was found shot to death inside a closet in his apartment on Jane Drive last November.

But the district attorney’s office refused to file charges against the suspects, two of whom are now free. The other two are in jail on charges unrelated to the drug-related killing, according to Estrella.

The problem, he said, was that most of the potential witnesses are gang members and are unwilling to testify.

“The law of the jungle is, you rat, talk to the cops, you testify--you or your family will pay the price,” Estrella said. “They’re not willing to do that.”

Port Hueneme Homicides

Port Hueneme has had five unrelated homicides in the past eight months, an unusually high number for Ventura County’s third smallest city. Here are the locations of the homicides, two of which police consider “Whodunits” with no obvious suspects.