Mother Questions Police Shooting : Investigation: Placentia officers say they opened fire when Blake Lundquist tried to run them over. His mother alleges that ‘they murdered my son for no reason.’

The mother of a young man shot to death Thursday by Placentia police says she doesn’t believe police claims that he tried to run over one of their officers.

“He was a sweet, kind, gentle person with a family that loved him,” Skipi Lundquist Smoot, a clinical psychologist in Laguna Niguel, said of her son, Blake Lundquist, 24. “He was a child; he hadn’t even lived yet. They had no right to murder him in cold blood.”

Detective Corinne Loomis, a spokeswoman for the Placentia Police Department, declined to discuss the case Friday, pending the outcome of an investigation by the district attorney’s office. A spokesman for the district attorney’s office also declined comment.

According to a short press release issued by the police, Lundquist, a part-time carpenter with a 5-year-old daughter, was killed about 1:30 p.m. during a police “surveillance” near Musial Street and McCormack Lane, a few blocks from the rented house Lundquist shared with his girlfriend. While police were trying to “make contact” with him, the press release said, “the suspect attempted to run over one of the officers. Both officers fired their weapons. The suspect sustained a gunshot wound.” Police would not say what they were investigating.

Smoot said she believes the police may have been looking for illegal drugs. But while Lundquist had been convicted twice of drug charges since 1991 and was still on parole after a year in prison for the last conviction, his mother said, “he had paid the price for it and he was home and he was trying to make something of himself. He was trying to become a good father to his little girl,” who lives with her mother, Lundquist’s former girlfriend.

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On Thursday morning, she said, Lundquist and his girlfriend had risen early and gone out for breakfast. Returning home about 9:30, she said, they took a nap. Then Lundquist took a shower and told his girlfriend that he was going to visit a friend a few blocks away and would be right back.

“Half an hour later she heard sirens,” Smoot said. “A friend told a friend, who told her that they thought Blake had been shot by the police.”

Smoot, who said she talked to witnesses, said she believes that her son was pulled over by two undercover officers while driving his Toyota truck. For some reason, she said, he apparently panicked and tried to drive away, whereupon one or both of the officers shot him in the head, chest and hand through the driver’s-side window. He was not on drugs and was not armed, she said.

“If he’d been trying to run them over they would have shot him from the front,” she said. “I don’t have any problem with thinking they were investigating a drug deal over there, but they murdered my son for no reason. Even if he was trying to get away, that’s no reason to kill him.”