Nearby Police Call Preceded Fatal Shooting

The police officers who fatally shot a Huntington Beach man after he allegedly pointed a toy rifle at them had been called into a nearby neighborhood minutes earlier to investigate reports that several men were going to beat up someone, police logs show.

The new details emerged Wednesday as the Orange County Sheriff’s Department continued to investigate the May 5 shooting of Antonio Saldivar, an 18-year-old farm worker, and the young man’s family announced its intentions to file a legal claim against the city.

Authorities have released little information about the shooting, so the police logs provide the clearest view yet of the officers’ movements in the minutes leading up to the deadly confrontation on Ash Street.

According to the Huntington Beach Police Department’s official account of the shooting, two patrolmen spotted Saldivar on the 17100 block of Ash Street at 1:39 a.m. Saturday, wearing dark clothes and peering into a parked vehicle. One officer gave chase on foot and caught up with him only a block away, crouching behind a truck in a driveway, police said. He was ordered--in English and Spanish--to show himself and when he did, he was pointing the toy rifle at the officer, who opened fire, reports state.

But it was a different case that the officers were dealing with just minutes before.

That started with a call from a man on Elk Circle. The caller said that he had kicked out his girlfriend and “a male friend of hers just called and said he had guys coming over” to beat him up and he should not open his door unless he had a weapon, police records show.

The patrol unit arrived at the scene at 1:34 a.m. Five minutes later, the officers from that same unit reported an officer-involved shooting on the 17100 block of Ash Street, the logs show.

The log does not detail the officers’ actions between leaving Elk Circle and Saldivar’s shooting.

Lt. Chuck Thomas, spokesman for the Huntington Beach Police Department, said he was unaware of the call to Elk Circle. He said the fact that both that call and the shooting are included in the same incident report does not mean that they are related.

Sometimes, he said, officers do not have time to call in and report that they have cleared one scene before something else comes up. So, he added, they may have dealt with the first situation, driven away and became involved with the next situation before getting a chance to “come on the radio and say: ‘We’re back off that call.’ ”

The logs show that the patrol unit reported an officer-involved shooting at 1:39 a.m., and that several neighbors began calling about shots being fired a minute or two later. Within minutes, several other police units converged on the scene, records show.

On Wednesday, Saldivar’s family hired attorney Federico Castelan Sayre of Newport Beach to represent them.

The fact that the same patrol unit that shot Saldivar had responded to a disturbance call minutes before his slaying raises questions about whether the officers were searching for a suspect from the earlier incident, Sayre said in a interview Thursday. But he said an investigator in his office is just beginning to review the evidence.

Sayre said he will file an administrative claim against Huntington Beach and the Police Department today for $15 million, claiming police officers were negligent and that they violated Saldivar’s civil rights. Such an action is often a precursor for a lawsuit.

On Wednesday, city and police officials continued to decline to identify the officer involved in the shooting, citing alleged threats against officers stemming from the shooting.