SANTA ANA : Teen’s Gun, Woman’s Death May Be Linked

Police are investigating the possibility that a teen-age boy arrested Monday afternoon for threatening an officer with a gun may be linked to the weekend slaying of a 55-year-old woman.

The unidentified 15-year-old boy was arrested about 4:30 p.m. after a police officer involved in a narcotics investigation questioned him at a shopping center in the 400 block of West 17th Street. The youth’s name is being withheld because of his age.

The site is about four blocks north of the apartment complex in the 300 block of West Washington Avenue where Valentina Roque was shot once in the chest Sunday night as she watched the street from a balcony of the second-floor apartment she occupied with her son and his family.

The boy took a gun out of his waistband and pointed it at the officer, who grabbed the weapon and wrestled the boy to the ground. Police Sgt. Bob Clark said the boy’s gun, which is the same small-caliber handgun as the one used in the shooting, aroused suspicions.

He said investigators want to know if the gun and the boy were involved in the shooting. Clark declined to specify the gun’s caliber.

The youth is being held at Juvenile Hall on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon and brandishing a weapon, Sgt. Clark said. No hearing has been scheduled.

No motive has been established for Roque’s slaying, which police are continuing to investigate. Neighbors have said the area around the complex is frequented by drug dealers and gang members and speculated that the victim might have witnessed a drug deal.

Relatives of the woman, who had moved here from Mexico just eight months ago, gathered Tuesday at her apartment to grieve. Her body, said the woman’s son, Santos Alvarez Roque, will be released by the county coroner’s office Thursday or Friday.

In the meantime, Alvarez said, the family is organizing her funeral. Alvarez said he is preparing to move his wife and small child out of the apartment where his mother was killed.

“This apartment will bring me only memories of her, and I find that unbearable,” he said. “We have to move away, perhaps to back to Mexico.”

Alvarez said he had been informed of the boy’s arrest Tuesday morning.

“If he’s the killer, I don’t want to see his face. I am a Catholic and believe that whomever did this will pay before God,” he said.