Police seek answers after gunman kills 4 in Orange shootout

The gunman who killed four people, including a 9-year-old boy, in an Orange office park locked the doors of the complex with bicycle cable locks and was armed with a gun as well as spray. pepper and handcuffs, police said Thursday.

Authorities said the shooting took place at a consultancy firm, Unified Homes, and that the shooter and the victims were linked by professional and personal relationships. Wednesday’s attack was not random, they said.

Officers received a call around 5:30 p.m. of shots fired at the business in the 200 block of West Lincoln Avenue. Police encountered gunfire upon arrival and opened fire, Orange Police Lt. Jennifer Amat said.

Because the doors were locked, police officers who responded to the scene shot at them and injured the shooter, Amat said. Police had to use bolt cutters to enter the complex.

Officers found two victims in the yard, one of whom was the 9-year-old boy, and an adult female who had also been shot and taken to hospital, where she remains in critical condition.

Police then located three other victims, who had died, including an adult female found on an outside landing upstairs, an adult male in an office and an adult female in a separate office.

Police recovered a semi-automatic handgun and backpack with pepper spray, handcuffs and ammunition from the scene, “which we believe belonged to the suspect,” Amat said Thursday.

The names of the victims were not disclosed as not all of their next of kin were informed, she said. The suspect is Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez, a 44-year-old man from Fullerton who police say has a “professional and personal relationship” with the victims.

Two police officers unloaded their weapons at the scene, said Kimberly Edds, spokesperson for the Orange District Attorney’s Office, which is investigating the shootings involving police officers. Both wore body cameras.

The Orange Police Department is investigating the suspect and the victims, Edds said, and will forward their reports to the district attorney’s office, which may prosecute the suspect as early as Thursday.

The public prosecutor’s investigation into the shooting could last “several months, up to a year,” she said. No officer was injured at the scene.

The incident – the third mass shooting in the United States in two weeks – stunned the quiet northern neighborhood of Orange.

Uvaldo Madrigal was in his office at Lincoln Body & Paint, his auto store next to the filming location, when he heard thumping noises.

“They sounded very low,” he said, “so I didn’t think it was gunshots.”

Then Madrigal heard about 10 gunshots, followed by silence. He looked outside and saw about five police cars in the middle of Lincoln Avenue and officers with their guns.

He rushed to the back of his shop and told an employee to come in. A few minutes later, the police told him and his employee that they had to leave the area; as they did, Madrigal saw two people on stretchers loaded into an ambulance.

“I don’t know what condition they were in,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened here.”

Judging by the muffled sound of gunfire, Madrigal thought the cartridges were being fired inside.

“Normally, when you hear gunshots in the open, they’re louder,” he says. “The shots were ringing just lower; they sounded different.

Orange’s violence came a week after a gunman opened fire on a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado and two weeks after a massacre at three Atlanta-area spas.

“Horrible and heartbreaking. Our hearts are with the families affected by this terrible tragedy, ”California Governor Gavin Newsom said of the Orange shooting on Wednesday night.

Orange City Council member Arianna Barrios said the community was trying to get a feel for what happened inside the office building on Wednesday. So far, there have been few responses.

“It’s absolutely amazing that something like this is happening at Orange,” she said. “But as we have seen across the country, we are not the only ones to suffer this kind of tragedy. I think we’re all waiting to hear the why.

Amat said the city has not experienced this type of violence since 1997, when a mass shooting occurred at a California Department of Transportation maintenance yard in the city. Five people were killed and at least two others injured, including a police officer, when a former official wielding an assault rifle opened fire on them.

The gunman was recently dismissed from his post and went to his former workplace with an AK-47 assault weapon. He was killed in a shootout with police on a nearby street corner.

Video footage of Wednesday’s scene captured by OnScene.TV showed a group of police and fire vehicles on the block, including at least five ambulances.

Paula Shaw, who lives nearby, told OnScene that she was on her computer when she heard a “bunch of pops.”

“Sure enough, someone was shooting at the office building,” she said, noting that she had heard about 10 shots.

Neighbors said they were stunned by what had happened.

18-year-old Nathan Zachary and his father were cooking fried chicken for dinner when, while browsing Instagram, he learned the news of the shooting. The two went out to see what was going on.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Zachary said, describing the neighborhood as “a safe and really safe area.”

He and his father stood on the sidewalk in flannel pajamas, trying to follow the movement of the many policemen moving around the scene.

“Hard to sleep,” Zachary said, “unless you know what’s going on.”

Camilo Akly, 28, was unable to pick up his younger brother, who was hanging out with a boyfriend in a house opposite the crime scene.

Thus, Wednesday evening, after having walked several blocks to join his brother, then having seen “one by one by one of the police cars stop, then heard the helicopter, then watch the firefighters rushing”, he said. ‘is stopped to try to understand the problem. situation.

“You think nothing could happen during your night out, and all of a sudden it changes really fast,” he says. “So much to watch out for these days.”

Other neighbors spread out on the sidewalk, filming the commotion with their cell phones and posting their recordings on Facebook.