Second Victim of Shooting Spree at Party Appears Near Death

As Santa Ana police sifted through the evidence in one of the city’s most violent shootings in recent memory, investigators said Monday that a second of five victims appears close to death.

Angel Ureno, 17, of Anaheim was killed in the Sunday incident, which left four others wounded by a spray of bullets fired into the frontyard of a house where a party was taking place. Investigators said one of the four, whom police declined to identify, remained in critical condition Monday and was not expected to live.

Lt. Dave Petko, a spokesman for the Santa Ana Police Department, backed off earlier comments that the weapon appeared to be an AK-47, but said that police still believe the gun was an automatic assault rifle.

“An inordinate amount of ordnance went through that weapon in a short period of time,” Petko said Monday. “Nobody can squeeze the carbine that fast. . . . We’re comfortable that it was, at the very least, an automatic assault rifle of some sort.”

Police suspect it was a gang member who sprayed at least 24 bullets from the weapon into the gathering of about 20 people outside a home in the 2000 block of South Broadway.

Although gang shootings have declined recently in Orange County, police expressed concerns Monday about the use of what appeared to be an automatic assault rifle.

Last week in Anaheim, police seized two magazine clips for an AK-47 assault rifle from a teenager after a pursuit, officials said. And, in a separate incident last week, a family of four was caught in a barrage of bullets from an AK-47 in the Los Angeles County community of Florence, where they had gone to pick up their broken-down car.

Automatic assault rifles are “out there. . . . They’ve been there for years, and we’re seeing more and more,” said Resident Agent Dan Cabrera, who supervises the Santa Ana office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “People get them through burglaries, from illegal gun dealers or from modifying legal weapons.”

Despite a federal ban on AK-47s, Uzis and other types of assault rifles, such weapons are increasingly used in urban gang violence, Cabrera said.

“The 9-millimeter handgun remains the weapon of choice among gang members, or so it seems,” Cabrera said, “but we do know that gang members have AK-47s and other types of assault rifles at their disposal--Uzis and Mac 10s, Mac 11s and Mac 12s. We’re not overly surprised by any of the weapons out there.”

Lt. Ron Wilkerson, spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, said the trend toward increased use of assault rifles is “one we’re seeing not just in Southern California but throughout the nation. Still, in our jurisdiction, most of what we see among gang members is the use of semiautomatic handguns.”