Man Shot Dead Through Open Doorway at AA Meeting

A 28-year-old Anaheim man was shot in the throat and killed Monday might as he sat on a sofa at a Spanish-language Alcoholics Anonymous meeting he was attending here, police said Tuesday.

Shots came from the street at 8:28 p.m. and Ramon Toro slumped over on the couch in the storefront meeting room, said Fullerton Sgt. Glenn Deveny. The shooting was so abrupt that most of those attending the meeting had no idea what had happened, he said.

“The place was full and the door was open because of the heat,” Deveny said. “A shot was fired into the meeting. It went right in the door and hit the guy. He was sitting on a couch across the room.”

Deveny said investigators are trying to determine a motive for the shooting. No one at the scene saw any or heard a car, he said.

“It definitely wasn’t a drive-by,” he said. “Nobody saw a thing. That’s the bad part. . . . There is no suspect. We don’t know whether there was any intent.”

Toro was taken to St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, where he was pronounced dead.

A neighbor whose house is behind the meeting room in the 500 block of South Harbor Boulevard said he heard six shots. One bullet pierced his bedroom wall.

“I didn’t hear a car,” said Mike Gregg, who has lived in the neighborhood for four years. “I was sitting in my bedroom. Then I heard the gunshots. Then I heard something hit the building.”

Police surveyed the scene until 2:30 a.m. and gouged the bullet out of his wall, Gregg said. This was not the first time the night was punctuated by gunfire in the neighborhood, he said.

“It’s not an everyday thing, but it is common,” Gregg said.

The small meeting room cluttered with chairs and sofas is regularly booked by a Spanish-language AA group that bills its meetings as “El Ultimo Traigo,” or “The Last Drink,” said an Alcoholics Anonymous member at the group’s Fullerton office.

The organization is a fellowship of people committed to overcoming their addiction to alcohol by following a 12-step philosophy of recovery.

Tuesday afternoon, the small storefront office sandwiched between a bridal shop and an empty lot was darkened and the door locked. An employee of the bridal shop said the doors are generally open all day.

The building’s facade was unmarred by gunshots. Deveny said it appears no shots hit that building, but the bullet that killed Toro found its way straight through the open door. About 15 people were attending the meeting and some heard gunfire before Toro was hit, he said.

“He just slumped over on the sofa,” the employee said. “Here the guy is doing something right obviously to get his problems taken care of, and something like that comes along.”

According to an AA office manager in Santa Ana, no meeting has ever been the target of a shooting in the past 21 years. About 800 Alcoholics Anonymous groups operate in Orange County, she said.

“Nothing like that has happened, ever,” she said.

Little information about Toro could be obtained Tuesday.