Bloody O.C. Weekend: 6 Slain and 8 Wounded

One of Orange County’s most violent weekends of the year continued Sunday when two people were shot to death, three others were wounded and police announced the discovery of another homicide victim stuffed in a box.

The violence brought the total number of slayings since early Saturday morning to six. At least eight people were wounded--all in attacks believed to be gang-related--during the same period of time, police said.

“It looks like it was an especially bad weekend for everybody,” said Santa Ana Police Sgt. Dick Faust. “It comes in streaks. You can’t really predict homicides. Sometimes you go for weeks without anything, and then other times there is a lot of activity in just a matter of days.”

The number of slayings surpassed the total of four people who were killed by gunfire in a 14-hour period in July.

From San Clemente to Anaheim, gangs were blamed for attacks throughout the weekend that accounted for two of the shooting deaths and all the injuries. Santa Ana was the site of the most bloodshed, with five separate shootings, including one gunfight Saturday in which 300 rounds were fired, police said.

Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young called the weekend violence “extraordinary.”

“We’re going to go out and we’re going to find the people involved and they’re going to go to jail,” he said. “That seems to be a relative certainty. But to me, that’s not even half of the solution. How do we go about the business of educating people about how not to shoot each other?”

Young said the city’s anti-gang and anti-drug programs are aimed primarily at elementary school children. He said one of the city’s major problems is that the older youth responsible for much of the crime belong to “a lost generation . . . we’re having to deal with exclusively on the enforcement side.”

“This is just hitting us on a daily basis, almost,” added Karen Lott, who organized a peace march attended by about three dozen supporters in Mission Viejo on Sunday to call attention to Orange County’s youth violence. “People have the wrong mentality: it’s not our schools, not our kids. . . . It’s time that everyone start talking about what’s going on.

“If it doesn’t touch people’s lives personally, they tend to ignore it,” said Lott, whose 17-year-old son, Philip, was critically injured in a drive-by shooting near El Toro High School last year. “That’s why I want to get out and talk to as many people as I can. It’s time to make some changes.”

In the violence reported Sunday, gang-related shootings in Anaheim and Santa Ana left two people dead and three wounded. Police reported that another slain man was found Saturday in Westminster. He may have been killed by blows to the head, said Police Lt. Richard Main.

In the Anaheim shooting, Eusebro Elizalde Arteaga, 16, was fatally shot in the back about 1 a.m. Sunday as he and his brother walked home after visiting with an uncle. The attack occurred on the 1600 block of Jeffrey Drive, a block notorious for gangs, drugs and violence, police and city officials say.

Police said a car approached the brothers and opened fired for no apparent reason. One bullet felled Arteaga, a 12th-grader at Loara High School who is not a gang member. Another bullet penetrated a window in a nearby apartment and lodged in the wall of a room where two children were sleeping, police said. They were not harmed.

“I tried to help him,” said Arturo Chavez Arteaga, the victim’s 27-year-old brother, who was near tears. “He had trouble breathing.” Arturo Arteaga, who said he did not see his brother’s attackers, administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation until paramedics arrived.

Eusebro Arteaga was pronounced dead at UCI Medical Center in Orange. Police have no suspects in the shooting.

While Arturo Arteaga was being consoled Sunday afternoon by friends and relatives at his apartment, residents of the area circulated the neighborhood with a shoe box collecting donations to send the dead boy to his parents in Mexico to be buried.

About two hours after Arteaga’s shooting Sunday, an unrelated drive-by assault in Santa Ana left a 24-year-old man dead and three others injured.

The dead man, identified by friends as Alex Hernandez of Santa Ana, was standing in a driveway at 2014 S. Kilson Drive with several people drinking beer when a dark-colored sedan drove slowly by the group. At least one of the car’s occupants opened fire with a 9-millimeter handgun, police said.

Hernandez was shot several times in the chest. Three other men sustained minor gunshot wounds. Two of them drove Hernandez to Western Medical Center in Santa Ana, where he was pronounced dead.

“He was just a nice person and a hard worker,” said a friend.

The dead man found in Westminster was identified as 26-year-old Adarca Gerardo Palacios. He died either Friday night or early Saturday morning, and was left in a box behind a commercial building in the 15200 block of Golden West St., police said.

No other details on Palacios’ slaying were available.

Sgt. Faust said Sunday’s drive-by did not appear to be related to four shootings that occurred Saturday and left two men dead and four others wounded. Those shootings occurred in a span of two hours and were scattered across two square miles of Santa Ana.

In two of those shootings, 33-year-old Natividad Mundragon was killed when he apparently attempted to resist a street robbery and 26-year-old Miguel Angel Soto was slain after a dispute with another motorist.

In a gang-related gunfight Saturday, two groups of gunmen fired 300 rounds at each other on a residential cul-de-sac, police said. Two witnesses to the shootout were injured.

Three other people were wounded in gang-related violence Saturday, including a 17-year-old boy who was speared through the head by a metal rod in San Clemente.

Another homicide in Anaheim on Saturday night left Michael Jones, 31, of Anaheim dead. Jones was killed during another apparent robbery attempt in the 1800 block of W. Gramercy Ave., police said. No suspects have been located.