Man Fatally Shot, Young Brother Hurt : Violence: Victim had said gang members were stalking him. He was planning to move to Mexico to escape.

A 20-year-old man who told his family he wanted to move to Mexico to get away from gang life was killed and his younger brother was wounded Tuesday night in what police said was a gang-related drive-by shooting.

Santa Ana police spokesman Dick Faust said the dead man, Jesse Bonilla, and his 12-year-old brother were fixing the radio in Bonilla’s car about 11:47 p.m. in front of their house in the 1300 block of Tolliver Street when the shooting occurred.

Faust said a brown vehicle drove past and someone fired several rounds from a semiautomatic weapon, hitting Bonilla in the back of the head and his brother in the back.

Bonilla died at the scene. His brother, whose name was not released, was taken to UCI Medical Center, where he was reported in stable condition, Faust said.

The vehicle involved in the shooting was last seen traveling west on Tolliver Street at high speed, Faust said.

Police Lt. Bob Helton said that Bonilla was a known gang member but that investigators did not know the reason for the shootings. Helton said the young brother is not a gang member.

Bonilla’s family and friends said Wednesday that Bonilla turned to religion and was no longer in a gang, a life he had pursued off and on since dropping out of high school about five years ago.

But relatives said he knew that leaving that lifestyle is easier said than done.

For the last year, Bonilla had kept saying it was just a matter of time before gang members would make good their threats to kill him, said his sister, Maria del Carmen Bonilla.

He told her that gang members had jumped him once and promised to kill him the next time. But she could not offer a reason for threats.

The fear of violence was behind Bonilla’s plan to move to Mexico, she said.

“They’ve been looking for him for a while--this time they got him,” said Maria del Carmen Bonilla, 18.

On Wednesday, she nervously peered out the window of her home every time a car passed, checking on her 2-year-old nephew playing in the front yard.

She said she and her mother were in the kitchen when they heard the shots Tuesday night.

“No one thought it could have been (Bonilla), but when my sister went outside to (check), she started screaming, ‘Mom, they shot him! Mom, they shot him!’ ” she said.

She said her brother had been working in construction trying to earn enough money for the trip to Mexico.

“He’d been doing pretty good with the job and helping out around the house,” she said. “It just seems like a dream to everyone. We just can’t believe” that he was killed.

Gang members “wanted to get him,” she said. “They . . . hated him. My brother knew it was just a matter of time.”