Police Raid Jeffrey-Lynne, Arrest Nine : Anaheim: County authorities and 90 police officers participated in the dawn sweep, in which 25 places were searched. Suspected gang members are charged with killings and other crimes going back to 1991.

Police swept through the troubled Jeffrey-Lynne neighborhood at dawn Friday, arresting nine suspected gang members in connection with three slayings and other attacks in the last two years.

About 90 police officers from Anaheim, Fullerton, Placentia and Orange, along with investigators from the Orange County district attorney’s office and the county probation departments, spread through the neighborhood and elsewhere beginning at 7 a.m., raiding the homes of suspected Jeffrey Street gang members.

Twenty-five places were eventually searched in the neighborhood and in Orange, Stanton, Santa Ana and Mission Viejo, where police say some Jeffrey Street members may now live.

Officers said that in the raids they found evidence tying the suspects to a number of bloody drive-by and walk-up attacks in Anaheim. These date from the December, 1991, shotgun death of 16-year-old Armando Hurtado to the Oct. 3 fatal drive-by shooting of 19-year-old Teofilo Carlos.

“We want to get the message out that we will aggressively investigate all gang-related assaults and killings,” said Sgt. Steve Rodig, head of Anaheim’s robbery/homicide unit.

Evidence seized included several rifles, handguns, drawings depicting gang logos and nicknames, and photographs of members partying and flashing gang hand signs, police said.

Jeffrey-Lynne, a five-square-block area of run-down apartments just west of the Disneyland Hotel and home to 4,000 people, has been targeted for cleanup efforts in the past by city officials and police because of the violence and drug sales plaguing its streets.

Arrested on charges of murder were Victor Flores, 20; Javier Godinez, 18; Manuel Quinonez, 19; and Carlos Rodriguez, 20, all of Anaheim. Also arrested were Marcos Millones, 19, of Mission Viejo and the three Anaheim juveniles, ages 17, 16 and 15, whose names were not released because of their ages.

The adults are being held without bail in the Anaheim jail; the juveniles were taken to Orange County Juvenile Hall.

All are charged with the Teofilo Carlos shooting. Quinonez is also charged with the Oct. 28, 1992, drive-by shooting death of 15-year-old Francisco Hernandez. Godinez is charged with Hurtado’s death. One of the juveniles is charged with attempted murder for allegedly firing the bullets that wounded two Jeffrey-Lynne boys ages 4 and 7 who tried to hide as gang members exchanged gunshots with a carload of people from another city last July.

“These (Jeffrey Street) gang members are directly responsible for other gang members’ coming into this neighborhood and shooting innocent people,” Rodig said. “Maybe some of the people in the neighborhood will now start calling us and letting us know what the gang members are doing.”

Rodig said the raids were born of the department’s investigation of Carlos’ death and the critical wounding of his brother Joel Carlos, 20, as they stood on Olive Street. The inquiry uncovered evidence tying the suspects to that attack and several others, he said.

One of the slayings police say they solved Friday may have triggered another gang’s retaliatory strike into Jeffrey-Lynne Oct. 16, leaving an innocent 16-year-old resident, Eusebio Elizade Arteaga, dead.

But members of another Anaheim gang, the Optional Boys, were upset Friday by comments made by Anaheim Police Lt. Vince Howard that members of their gang may have been involved in that shooting. The comments were printed in an article that ran in Friday’s Times Orange County Edition.

Jessie Arredondo, president of the nonprofit United Barrio Council, said she was flooded with phone calls from members of the Optional Boys saying they were being wrongly accused.

“Nobody knows who did this,” said Arredondo, adding that tensions on the street are high and that something as simple as a line in a newspaper could set off violence.

“If it was them, they wouldn’t have bothered calling.” Fernando Carlos, the brother of Teofilo Carlos, the 19-year-old killed two weeks ago in the Optional Boys neighborhood, called the Times on Friday to express sympathy for the Arteaga family. But he said the Optional Boys had nothing to do with the death.

“I’ve experienced what they’ve experienced,” said Carlos, 25, who works as a ceramic tile salesman. “I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to go through that.

“But the day my brother passed away,” he said, “I asked our boys to respect me. . . . Our family didn’t want a pay-back.

“I don’t see anything to be gained by killing another person.”

Police making the arrests Friday met no resistance. About five officers would knock on a front door while one or two others would guard the back windows.

At one home, a suspect yawned loudly as an officer handcuffed and searched him.

“That’s just a macho facade these guys put up,” Sgt. Craig Hunter, head of Anaheim’s gang detail, said. “Pretty soon, reality will set in. Nobody wants to go to jail.”

In that suspect’s bedroom, which police searched for evidence, hung a group photograph and a city of Anaheim certificate dated Sept. 14 honoring his completion of “Devil Pups,” a 10-day Marine Corps boot camp for teens at Camp Pendleton.

At another home, a suspect’s father told Anaheim Police Sgt. Harold Mittmann that he works two jobs and attends night school and finds it hard to supervise his son.

“A lot of these families--the father, the mother, the sisters--are good people, they just can’t control their sons,” Mittmann said.

Times staff writer Jeff Brazil contributed to this story.