Police Officer’s Alleged Killer Slain in Siege : Crime: Reputed gang member is felled by a single rifle shot, reportedly after firing on police during a three-hour standoff in Hollywood. Suspect’s death ends citywide manhunt.

Cornered in a Sunset Boulevard motel and vowing that he would not be taken alive, the man suspected of slaying Los Angeles Police Officer Charles D. Heim was shot to death by police Sunday afternoon, ending an intensive Sylmar-to-San Pedro search by Heim’s fellow officers.

After a three-hour standoff that shut down an east Hollywood neighborhood, reputed gang member Manuel Vargas Perez, 26, was fatally wounded shortly before 1 p.m. by a single rifle bullet fired by one of Heim’s LAPD Metro Division colleagues as the suspect brandished a handgun in the doorway of a room at the Lucky 7 Motor Inn, officials said.

The standoff began about 9:30 a.m. when officers acting on a tip converged on the motel. In more than two hours of telephone conversations with LAPD negotiators, Perez defiantly refused to surrender, police said. Shortly after the first conversation, at about 10:45 a.m., Perez reportedly fired at least two shots at police officers and retreated into the room.

Police said they were satisfied Sunday that the manhunt had ended without Perez harming other officers or taking any hostages. “It brings it to an end, but it doesn’t lessen the hurt. We still lost Chuck,” said LAPD spokesman Officer Art Holmes, referring to Heim’s murder.

The two-story beige motel where Perez was killed is only four blocks east of the Dunes Sunset Motel, where he allegedly gunned down Heim and wounded his partner, Officer Felix F. Pena, 35, on Friday night as they went to Perez’s room looking for evidence of drug dealing.

After the Friday gun battle with officers, Perez jumped from a second-story bathroom window at the Dunes and escaped as police closed in on the motel. But he apparently stayed in the East Hollywood neighborhood during a citywide search for him by officers in all 18 LAPD divisions, who were supplied with his photo and record during roll call Sunday morning.

Perez was reported to be a member of a Westside “set” of White Fence, one of the oldest street gangs in Los Angeles, and was known on the streets as “White Dude” because of his light skin.

A police spokesman said Perez had a lengthy arrest record, including juvenile offenses and adult arrests for carrying a concealed weapon, burglary and battery. He served short jail terms for some of the adult offenses. His longest sentence was 180 days for tampering with a vehicle.

Over the weekend, with police following up scores of telephone tips on Perez’s whereabouts, the suspect apparently was never far from the murder scene.

Acting Sunday morning on a tip that Perez was in a first-floor room of the Lucky 7, police staked out the motel. A woman whom police declined to identify was in the room with Perez and surrendered to officers without incident.

Around 10:45 a.m., Perez opened the door and fired at least two shots at six uniformed officers standing in the parking lot, but hit none of them, police said. An officer fired a single shotgun round and Perez retreated into the ground-floor room, Chief Willie L. Williams said during a news conference at Parker Center in Downtown Los Angeles.

Over the next two hours, Perez became increasingly agitated, reportedly telling police negotiators that he would kill more officers and commit suicide rather than surrender.

“It was not the most lucid of conversations,” Williams told reporters.

At one point during the standoff, Perez yelled out that he had “‘nothing to lose and will kill any police officer he sees,”’ LAPD Capt. Bruce Hagerty said as he stood outside the motel before Perez was shot. “He made it very clear that he did not intend to come out.”

After Perez’s first volley of shots, police brought in a virtual army of officers and equipment for a possible storming of the motel room. Police helicopters buzzed overhead. Authorities cordoned off an six-square-block section of the Hollywood neighborhood--a mixture of seedy motels with a reputation for prostitution and drug trade, and congenial residential side streets where many immigrants from Latin America and Armenia have settled.

Sriwong Ayasit, editor and publisher of a local Thai weekly newspaper, was breakfasting in the Thai restaurant attached to the U-shaped motel when Perez first fired. “We started to get scared when the police came. We knew it was serious,” she said. Police ordered her and the dozen or so other restaurant patrons and employees to run to safety two at a time.

According to Chief Williams, Perez again opened the motel room door at about 12:50 p.m. and walked outside with a .380 semiautomatic pistol in his hand.

Believing that Perez was “about to make good on his threat to kill officers,” officer Greg Horton, 44, a 22-year department veteran--and, like Heim, a member of the Metro Division--fired a single round from his high-powered rifle at Perez, the chief said. The suspect fell back into the room.

Although Perez was not pointing his gun at the officers, he held it “in a manner that it could be used offensively,” Williams said. “He had already come out before and fired at officers.”

Not knowing whether Perez was still alive, police detonated a flash-bang decoy device outside the room and rushed in. No further shots were fired. Perez was pronounced dead at the scene, although Williams declined to say in what part of the body Perez was wounded.

Perez’s female companion was being detained for questioning Sunday night.

Authorities had begun to evacuate motel guests but stopped after Perez fired his first shots Sunday morning. Police cordoned off a three-block stretch of Sunset Boulevard from Serrano Avenue to Kingsley Drive and strung crime-scene tape to keep crowds back.

The incident snarled traffic in Hollywood as cars could not turn south from Hollywood Boulevard onto the blocked-off cross streets.

Many residents, effectively boxed in by the police action, stood at the fringes of the taped-off intersections and watched, talking casually with police who were handling traffic and crowd control.

After Perez was shot, one passerby from the crowd that gathered across the street from the motel asked, “Did they shoot the guy who killed the cop?”

Told that police had killed the suspect, the man said: “Good.”

Heim, 33, an 11-year veteran of the force, was the second LAPD officer shot to death within a year and the 10th Southland law enforcement officer to be gunned down in the last 18 months. In February, LAPD rookie Officer Christy Lynne Hamilton, 45, was killed by a distraught teen-ager after she and her partner answered a family dispute call in Northridge.

It had been Heim’s somber duty over the past five years to lead the riderless horse that is a traditional part of funerals of officers killed in the line of duty.

Heim’s wife, Beth, herself a police officer and pregnant with the couple’s first child, has asked that the horse not be included at his funeral later this week.

At the time of his death, Heim was on temporary assignment from the Metro Division to the Hollywood Division.

The slain officer also leaves a 12-year-old son, who lives with Heim’s ex-wife in Kernville.

Heim died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center a few hours after he was shot at the Dunes Motel. His partner, Pena, was wounded in the right hand and was treated and released Saturday. Another officer at the scene, Armen Sedvalian, exposed himself to the gunfire to pull Heim away but was unharmed, officers said.

Times staff writer Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this story.