Mother of 2 Fatally Shot at Market in Santa Paula

In what police described as a botched robbery attempt, a 25-year-old mother of two young children was fatally shot in her family’s convenience store Tuesday morning.

Mirna Regollar, who attended Ventura College’s nursing program at night, was found on the floor of Junior’s Market by a young girl who ran inside after hearing shots about 11 a.m., police said.

Regollar, shot in the head and chest, died four hours later after family members had her removed from life support at Santa Paula Memorial Hospital, according to authorities.

The killing of the young female business owner stunned this community, still pained by the shooting death of restaurant owner Isabel Guzman less than two years ago. Guzman died when a drunk customer shot her in the back alley of her seafood restaurant while she was unloading supplies.

“It’s very frightening and traumatic,” City Councilwoman Laura Flores Espinosa said Tuesday. “We all know these small-business owners and we all patronize their shops.”

Police fanned out across the Oak Street neighborhood to conduct interviews. They were looking for two young men seen running from the store.

They had made no arrests by late Tuesday, but said evidence so far suggests local youths killed the woman. A small amount of cash was taken, but most of the register remained full of money, police said.

“It makes us believe someone may have panicked during a robbery,” Santa Paula Police Cmdr. Bob Gonzales said.

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Regollar was remembered as a hard-working young woman who was juggling work and school to get ahead. She and her husband, Eligio, owned the small brick market, decorated on the outside with a mural depicting the Virgin Mary and farmland.

During the day, friends said, Mirna Regollar tended the store, taking advantage of breaks to read the textbooks she kept on the checkout counter. At night, her husband would arrive from his job at an Oxnard grocery distributor and take over, freeing his wife to go to her college classes, friends said. The couple lived in Oxnard with their 8-year-old son, 3-year-old daughter and Mirna Regollar’s mother.

“I’d go in there, and she’d be looking at her books while she was in there working,” said Frank Madrid, a beer salesman who visits the market frequently. The Regollars were members of St. Anthony’s Church in Oxnard, sending their son to the church’s private Catholic school, Madrid said.

Rosie Reyna, who lives next to the market, described Mirna Regollar as generous.

“If you didn’t have enough change to pay, she’d say, ‘Next time,’ ” Reyna said.

“She was real nice,” added the owner of a competing market down the street. “She was good people.”

No customers were in the store when the shooting occurred, authorities said. Residents heard the shots and called police. Paramedics rushed Regollar to the hospital.

Eligio Regollar and the woman’s mother, a brother and several other relatives were at the hospital when she was pronounced dead at 3:22 p.m. Gonzales said.

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Neighbors were stunned, but some said that in recent months, the tree-lined neighborhood of bungalows has turned violent, with increasing gunfire and robberies.

Olga Rodriguez, who has lived across the street from the market for 33 years, returned home from work early Tuesday because the shooting upset her mother, who had been sewing in the back of the house.

“This has been a very nice street,” Rodriguez said. “Just in the last month, we’ve been hearing shots here and there.”

Added Linda Totty, who lives behind the market: “We’ve called about gunshots before. I’ve grabbed my grandson and hit the floor. It’s a bad area.”

And Madrid said the Regollars had recently caught someone trying to break into the store. He said that the couple had two people on the job at nights, but that Mirna Regollar worked the day shift alone.

Her killing comes 19 months after the Guzman slaying.

On Nov. 2, 1996, Guzman was shot to death in an alley behind her popular seafood restaurant, La Playita. Guzman, 30, had asked intoxicated customer Felix Magana, who was then 50, to leave after he argued with another customer and showed off his handguns to a waitress.

Magana, a former farm worker and father of seven children, was sentenced last year to 25 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder.

“This is so tragic,” Flores Espinosa said about the two deaths.

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At the Oxnard grocery distributor where Eligio Regollar worked, owner Steve Borel said he has known the family for years. He said the couple opened the market about two years ago “to get ahead.”

“I knew her when she was little,” Borel said of Mirna Regollar.

Borel watched as Eligio Regollar sobbed upon learning on the telephone that his wife had been shot.

“The employees are very depressed,” he said. “Most of them have gone home.”

Chi is a Times staff writer. Wolcott and Hamm are Times correspondents.