Youth Slain in Doorway : Crime: Eighteen-year-old’s shooting by two attackers is witnessed by sister who was home. Neighbors say they have seen steady decline of Laguna Hills neighborhood.

As a sister and two friends looked on in horror, an 18-year-old man was gunned down Tuesday morning in the doorway of the home he shared with his family, officials with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said.

A motive for the shooting has not yet been established, and it is not known if the victim, Marco Tulio Bracamontes, knew his attackers, said Sheriff’s Lt. Dan Martini.

“The victim was either followed or chased back into the residence and was shot just as he got inside,” said Martini, who released few details about the shooting, other than to say it was not believed to be gang-related. Bracamontes was declared dead at the scene.

One of Bracamontes’ sisters and two male friends were inside the condominium in the 25000 block of Via Lomas when the shooting occurred about 9:45 a.m. No one else was injured, Martini said.

Homicides are rare in Laguna Hills, but a slaying four years ago occurred in the same block of Via Lomas. In that case, a 34-year-old woman was killed by a spurned lover who rammed into her car with his vehicle, then set it on fire.

“This is a typical South County community where there is not a high level of crime or many homicides, but incidents do occur,” Martini said.

Several residents in the Aliso Meadows complex, which is made up of 248 individually owned condominiums, reported hearing several gunshots and said they saw a red Nissan Sentra speed away from the complex, which is just off of Alicia Parkway.

No arrests have been made in connection with the shooting, but authorities are looking for two males seen inside the car.

“They took off in a hurry,” said resident Richard Velarde, who was driving toward the complex on Via Lomas, immediately after the shooting occurred.

“I saw a guy walking backward toward a car, and he had a gun in his hand,” said Velarde, 35. “He got into the car and took off in a hurry.”

The victim’s next-door neighbor, Jack Cooper, said he was getting ready to go to bed after working a graveyard shift when he heard at least five gunshots.

“It’s scary. Very scary,” Cooper said as he watched investigators comb the scene. “What happens if (the gunman) comes back?”

Martini described one of the assailants as a 5-foot-4 Latino who weighs about 160 pounds. He was wearing a gray shirt and black pants. He is believed to have been carrying a semiautomatic pistol, but Martini could not confirm that he was the gunman.

Martini described the other man as a 5-foot-9 “light-skinned” Latino, weighing about 135 pounds. He was wearing a gray sweat shirt.

Both men had short “slicked-back” black hair, Martini said.

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Hours after the shooting, Sheriff’s deputies helped the victim’s sister from the home to a waiting patrol car. At one point she collapsed, sobbing, to the ground. The woman spent hours talking to investigators outside the home.

A second sister arrived shortly after the shooting, talked to investigators, then left the scene in tears.

Neighbors said they did not know Bracamontes or his relatives. They said the family had moved into the complex about three months ago.

Neighbors said as many as 10 people were living in the home, but San Clemente resident Sheryl Foss, who owns the unit where the victim lived, said she rented out the home to the victim’s sister, her husband and their two children last September. She said she was unaware that anyone else was living there.

“If I had known, I would have put a stop to it,” Foss said.

Foss said the tenants always paid their rent on time and she was not aware of any existing problems at the unit.

But residents said that in the past five years, they have witnessed a decline in the area brought about by overcrowding in many of the units and an increasing number of absentee landlords.

“The neighborhood isn’t getting any better,” noted one resident of the complex, who said she was too frightened to give her name. “I had a ‘For Sale’ sign out in front of my house and someone even stole that. I hope we sell it soon.”

The neighbor Cooper, stunned by the shooting, also vowed to move.

“When I moved here 12 years ago, it was nice and tranquil,” he said. “Now, this has become the only raunchy area of Laguna Hills.”

Joseph Alvarez, a member of the Aliso Meadows board of directors, said many of the complex’s 248 units have become overcrowded, with as many as a dozen people sharing two- and three-bedroom homes.

“Things have been coming to a head,” Alvarez said. “The problem with this overcrowding is that we don’t know who’s who. We don’t know who belongs here.”