Suspect Arrested in Shooting of Woman Fighting Graffiti

In an unusual show of cooperation among law enforcement, residents and even some gang members, police early Friday arrested one of three alleged Santa Ana gang members suspected of shooting a woman after she tried to stop them from spraying graffiti on a garage door earlier this week.

“We’ve had an outpouring of calls from the public wanting to help us find these guys, including people who claim to be gang members who are mad about this as well,” Orange Police Lt. Ed Tunstall said. “This is the kind of thing that hits them in the chest . . . because it involves an innocent bystander.”

The attack reverberated through Southern California, prompting dozens of people to write letters and send flowers to the Police Department and UC Irvine Medical Center, where the shooting victim was initially hospitalized, one of her friends said.

Because of all the attention, the victim, a bus driver and part-time accountant who was not identified by police because she feared for her safety, requested that she be moved to another, undisclosed hospital.

The woman was listed Friday in good condition, Tunstall said.

A team of 10 Orange police officers worked around the clock on the case, Tunstall said. After three days of interviewing dozens of witnesses and pursuing leads, investigators obtained search warrants for five locations in Santa Ana and Anaheim. While serving the warrants early Friday, investigators arrested John Arnold Villalobos, 25, at his Santa Ana home in connection with the shooting, Tunstall said.

Authorities are continuing to search for two other suspects--Jorge Francisco Trejo and Lisandro Fernandez, both 20--in connection with the attack.

Villalobos was booked into the Orange jail on suspicion of attempted murder, Tunstall said.

A break in the case came when investigators linked an altercation between gangs earlier Monday night to the vandalism that led to the shooting.

A confrontation “having to do with one gang saying something disrespectful to another” at a billiard hall led to a fight, and several youths were kicked out of the business, Tunstall said. But before leaving, a group of young men went into a restroom and spray-painted the walls with their gang sign.

After leaving the pool hall, police said, the men drove to a home near Lemon Street and Collins Avenue and spray-painted their insignia outside a home that they thought belonged to a rival gang member.

The woman, who was driving by in her van, spotted them, honked her horn and waved, hoping to scare them off, she told police. Instead, they approached her car and began spray-painting her windshield and passenger-side window, police said.

The woman tried to drive off, but a car pulled up. A shot was fired, piercing the door of the woman’s car and hitting her in the stomach, investigators said.

Tunstall said that one of the surprising aspects of the case was the telephone calls investigators received from gang members angered by the attack.

“They thought [the shooting] was stupid and sort of brings down the heat for everybody else,” he said.

Indeed, as a result of the shooting, the Orange Police Department decided to increase the size of its gang unit from six to 10 members. And on Friday, the department decided that it would assign 20 additional officers whose focus would be to suppress gang activities, Tunstall said.

Times correspondent Hope Hamashige contributed to this story.