Holiday Weekend Rocked by 4 Slayings

A spate of weekend shootings that left four dead--and a fifth critically wounded--has made this year’s Independence Day among the bloodiest in memory.

In barely 28 hours, two teenagers were shot to death outside a Stanton pool hall, one man was found dead by the side of a road in Lake Forest, another man was gunned down outside an Anaheim apartment and a third teenager was shot in the head as he and friends drove down Westminster Boulevard.

The 16-year-old passenger remained in critical condition late Monday.

With the number of violent crimes in the county falling, the weekend’s mayhem baffled even the most veteran law enforcement officials.

“I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like this in quite a while,” Westminster Police Lt. Phil Marshall said. When the most recent violent crime wave reached a peak in the early 1990s, Orange County was recording nearly 200 slayings a year. But last year, the number dipped below 100 for the first time in more than a decade, hitting 85 compared with 102 homicides in 1997.

This weekend’s shootings quickly added at least four to 1999’s total. The two Stanton slayings brought that small town’s yearly homicide total to three, one more than in all of 1998.

“It’s crazy,” Anaheim Police Officer Harold Martin said. “I don’t think there’s any real rhyme or reason to it. . . . You can take a pair of dice and roll seven seven times in a row and never do it again.”

The slayings began the day after the Orange County district attorney’s office released a study showing an 18% drop in gang homicides, down to 32 in 1998. Police believe at least three of the weekend’s homicides were gang-related.

“It’s bad timing,” Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Tim Carney said. “I hope it’s a trend that doesn’t continue.”

Some police officials surmised the weekend’s warm weather triggered the renewed violence. Criminal justice experts frequently link the heat of July and August to upswings in crime.

“As the weather gets warm,” Sheriff’s Lt. Rich Paddock said, “stuff seems to happen.”

According to police, the weekend’s fatal violence began about 11 p.m. Saturday near Tri-Q-Billiard hall in a Stanton strip mall. A witness said a fight erupted among teenagers setting off fireworks in the parking lot. In the melee, four shots were fired and two teenage boys, both Vietnamese, were killed.

The identities of the teenagers--a 14-year-old nicknamed Johnny, who died at the scene, and a 17-year-old, whose lifeless body was dumped by friends outside a Garden Grove hospital--are being withheld pending notification of relatives and for “investigative reasons,” Carney said. Both shootings are thought to be gang-related.

About 2:50 p.m. Sunday, sheriff’s deputies investigating a possible car crash stumbled upon the body of Rogelio Cardenas, 21, lying alongside El Toro Road between Marguerite and Santa Margarita parkways in Lake Forest. The Anaheim man had been shot numerous times. It was unclear whether Cardenas had been shot at the scene or dumped there, authorities said, or whether the shooting was gang-related.

Just before 11 Sunday night, police responding to an emergency call in Anaheim found Eric De Soto, 23, lying in the walkway of an apartment complex in the 100 block of South Westchester Drive. Shortly after they arrived, he bled to death from multiple gunshot wounds. The slaying is believed to be gang-related, police said.

About 3 a.m. Monday, Westminster police were called to a Fountain Valley hospital where a 16-year-old Vietnamese boy was in critical condition with a gunshot wound to the head.

The teenager’s friends told police they had been driving down Westminster Boulevard just east of Magnolia Street when another car pulled up and someone began firing at them. The teenager, a passenger in the car, was struck, Marshall said. Witnesses told police that someone in the car carrying the wounded teenager may have fired back, the lieutenant said.

The teenager, whose name is not being released because he is a minor, was moved to UCI Medical Center in Orange.

Marshall said police don’t know if the shooting is gang-related.

“We don’t know why the shooting occurred or if it’s connected to any of the other shootings that happened,” he said. “But it’s rather unusual for two cars to have [people with] guns in them.”