Young Mother Slain at Store Remembered

They came Wednesday to leave simple memorials to mark a simple life.

The day after two men ended the life of Mirna Regollar, a 25-year-old mother of two, during an apparent botched robbery at the Santa Paula convenience store she had seen as her family’s ticket to a better life, customers, friends and neighbors visited the doorstep of the shuttered shop.

A dozen candles flickered on the concrete stoop alongside long-stemmed roses and other flowers. A handwritten note to Regollar’s grieving husband was wedged beneath a glass vase holding a single yellow rose. The note read: “God bless you and your children. May you find strength within yourself for them.”

It was signed simply: “A friend.”

The words seemed to mirror the views of residents in the poor rural community, who are accustomed to living with a per capita rate of violent crime that is second only to Oxnard, Ventura County’s largest city, but who nonetheless sought to make sense of a seemingly random crime.

“This is an ugly one,” said Cmdr. Bob Gonzales of the city’s Police Department. “If you look at a community like Santa Paula--or any community--and see how many mom-and-pop stores you do have, it could happen to any of them. It’s a tragedy in our own backyard and it’s sad it’s got to that stage.”

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The people who committed Santa Paula’s fourth slaying of 1998--the most in one year since at least 1980--may still be in the community.

Police said they had few leads in the killing of Regollar, a south Oxnard resident.

Two men were seen fleeing Junior’s Market in the 500 block of Oak Street after Regollar was shot in the head and chest.

Officers cordoned off the area and used police dogs in an effort to track the two men, who were described only as in their late teens or early 20s, one wearing a white shirt and the other a maroon shirt.

No money was taken from the open cash register, and the previous day’s receipts remained untouched in the store, Gonzales said.

“If it was a botched armed robbery and the guys panicked, she wouldn’t have had time to set the store alarm off,” he said.

The robbery would have been the fourth at the store in the past five years and the second in the two years the Regollars have owned it, Gonzales said.

“According to the victim’s mother, she didn’t want her daughter to have the store, and the daughter was very adamant they would have their store and cut their path in life,” he said.

Regollar had attended Ventura College for the past two years and planned to become a nurse. Her husband, Eligio, held a day job at an Oxnard grocery distributor and worked in the couple’s modest convenience store at night while his wife attended classes.

Authorities have made solving the crime a priority.

The Sheriff Department’s crime lab, four investigators from the Ventura County district attorney’s office and four investigators from the city’s police force are working on the case, Gonzales said.

This year’s four slayings--arrests have yet to be made in two of the cases--are straining the resources of the small, underfunded Police Department. Santa Paula has averaged two killings a year for the past 18 years.

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By contrast, urban Oxnard--with a population nearly six times larger than Santa Paula’s 26,900--has had six slayings so far this year.

When Regollar was shot Tuesday morning, even off-duty and reserve police officers were called to the tree-lined neighborhood a block from Barbara Webster Elementary School, Gonzales said.

With 29 sworn officers--only an administrator and an officer who runs an anti-drug program have been added to the department since 1972--the force is the county’s second-smallest, after Port Hueneme’s. Earlier this week, administrators were told the department would have to absorb a cut of almost 10% in its $3.1-million budget, Gonzales said.

Just last month, officials decided to place a proposal for a 4.5% utility tax on the ballot to raise almost $900,000 annually, in an effort to hire four additional police officers and two more firefighters.

The poor agricultural community traditionally has had the highest unemployment rate and lowest per capita income in the county.

“It really hurts to see what has happened over the years,” said Gonzales, 47, who has lived in Santa Paula since birth. “It’s a community that’s just barely getting by.”

The situation in Santa Paula affects police and residents alike.

People who live near where Regollar was shot, one block east of California 150, said they feel a sense of abandonment.

“I don’t think the police force cares much about this side of Ojai Road,” Efren Sanchez, 63, said as he sat on the front porch of a house his parents had owned since the 1930s, down the block from the store. “We don’t even care about calling the cops anymore.”

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The neighborhood has deteriorated in recent years, residents said.

Former resident Delia Martinez, 53, said she moved out of the city a few years ago because of the problems.

“I lived here practically all my life,” said Martinez, who visited the site of the slaying Wednesday with a friend. “It really got very bad--a lot of violence, a lot of gangs, drive-by shootings.”

But Regollar and her husband came willingly, determined to get ahead.

Residents described Mirna Regollar as generous, friendly and hard-working.

Neighbor Maria Medina said her 6-year-old daughter, Daisy, would sometimes help Regollar at the store. Her 2-year-old son would toddle to the store gripping a penny in his hand to buy chips that Regollar sometimes let him have for the token sum.

But now she is gone, leaving Medina to worry about the safety of her children in a neighborhood where a kind young mother could be killed so casually, so quickly.

“They had become real good friends--she was a very good person,” Martinez said as she interpreted for Medina. “We feel for her children most of all.”