Slaying Puts Riverside on Guard

A week after a pregnant Riverside woman was found slain inside her home, neighbors say they’re keeping their doors locked and remain fearful that the killer may have been one of the many transients living nearby in the city’s Fairmount Park.

Estela E. Perez, a 29-year-old mother of two and local PTA member, was found stabbed to death the morning of March 31, shortly before she had planned to take a walk with her sister. The killer remains at large.

Her sister told police that she saw a young man walking down Perez’s driveway when she pulled up to the house on Fairmount Boulevard about 8:45 a.m.

“When she got in, she saw her sister brutally murdered,” said Riverside Sgt. Leon Phillips, who said Perez was five months pregnant.

Perez’s young children, a boy and a girl, were not home at the time. Neither was her husband, Miguel, 33, police said.

When reached Thursday, Perez’s husband said Riverside detectives had instructed him not to speak publicly about his wife because it would harm their investigation.

“We want the guy off the streets and to put him in jail, and we don’t want anything to interfere with that,” one of Miguel Perez’s brothers said.

Since the homicide, the shaded neighborhood enclave of homeowners and renters has been on guard. Residents, reluctant to be identified, said they had been locking their doors, listening to police scanners and passing bits of information about the crime from neighbor to neighbor.

“We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” one mother said. “If this is some nut picking people off or looking for fame, I don’t want to be mixed up with him.”

Nearby Fairmount Park has attracted enough drug addicts that outreach workers have gone there to hand out syringe-sterilization kits.

Residents worry that the suspect is one of the homeless men who sleep in the park and in weedy vacant lots, though a city official said only 25 to 30 homeless frequent the park.

Police have not said if they suspect a transient.

Officials released a composite sketch last week of the man that the sister and a neighbor spotted leaving the driveway. He is described as a light-skinned, thin male between 20 and 23 years old. Police say he is about 5 feet 9 inches tall and was wearing a short-sleeve brown shirt and green pants.

Phillips said there might be a connection between the victim and her killer but that that had yet to be determined. He declined to release details about the killing.

Dom Betro, a Riverside city councilman whose ward includes Fairmount Park, called the slaying “shocking, just terrible,” and said he planned to hold a meeting within the next week to allay neighbors’ fears.

“It’s very out of character.... The type of crime, the very violent nature of this, it’s something we don’t hear about in this neighborhood,” he said Thursday.

Estela Perez was born in El Salvador and had dated Miguel Perez for about nine years, according to a relative who declined to be identified. The pair got married two or three years ago, the relative said in a phone interview, near the time they moved to Fairmount Boulevard.

Neighbors remembered Perez as a cheery homemaker who tended to her kids and her tulips and roses. She waved at dog-walkers in front of her dark blue one-story home.

Perez, neighbors said, was a PTA member at nearby Bryant Elementary, a K-6 school with about 400 students. One woman said Perez helped plan Cinco de Mayo festivities at the school.

“She was a great woman, but I just can’t [talk about it] right now,” said Bryant principal Laurene Bryden, her voice breaking.

Police are asking anyone with information about the crime to contact Det. James Brandt at (951) 320-8027 or Det. Mike Medici at (951) 320-8049.

Times staff writer Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this report.