Suspect in Attack on Doctor Eludes Police

Police on Saturday searched the home of a 73-year-old El Monte man wanted in the shooting of a Kaiser hospital doctor the day before, but the suspect remains at large.

Heavily armed Baldwin Park SWAT officers awakened neighbors with demands issued over a loudspeaker that Eugene Guavara surrender. When he didn’t come out, they went in to find an empty house, said Lt. Lili Hadsell.

Police said Guavara was identified from a videotape taken a few minutes after the shooting, which occurred in an employee lounge in the urology department at Kaiser Permanente Baldwin Park Medical Center. The tape showed a man pushing a wheelchair or walker.

Police won’t comment on a possible motive for the shooting.

The doctor, who was shot several times, was in stable condition Saturday, “awake, alert and doing better,” said Kaiser spokeswoman Reyna Del Haro. To protect the doctor’s family while the suspect remains free, the hospital did not release his name. Nor would they say whether Guavara was a patient at the hospital.

Neighbors said that Guavara has prostate cancer. Henry August, 57, who has lived next door to Guavara for 27 years, said Guavara did not share many details about his health.

“I only asked him, ‘Hey, Gene-o, how are you doing?’ I never pushed him to ask the particulars.”

Recently, August said, Guavara had been going “back and forth” to his doctor.

He said Guavara, who is retired, is a widower and a private man.

He lives alone in the one-story home with a flagstone facade and a front lawn dotted with fruit trees -- avocados, guavas, plums, apples and lemons -- that he tends carefully.

August said the two of them often discussed politics over their fence, and that Guavara is generous in sharing his harvests of fruit as well as squash and tomatoes.

Another neighbor, Dolores Lopez, 44, who has lived across street from Guavara for about 10 years, said she had seen the hospital videotape on the TV news and thought it looked like her neighbor, whom she saw daily pruning his trees, raking leaves and sweeping the sidewalk.

When she was awakened at 4 a.m. by the SWAT team officers Saturday, she said, those suspicions were confirmed.

She said she heard, “Occupant in the house, please come out. Please remove yourself from the house.”

Lopez said that she didn’t know Guavara had been sick.

“I can’t believe it. We are totally surprised,” she said. “We never saw any bizarre behavior. He was a nice retired man tending to his garden.”

Police said that they believed Guavara may be driving a white 1987 Ford Aerostar, license plate number 2DNW323.

Hundreds of people, including patients, were evacuated after the shooting as sheriff’s deputies searched room by room.

Del Haro said that the hospital had resumed full operations by 1:30 a.m. Saturday.

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Times staff writer Cara Mia DiMassa contributed to this report.