Orange, Calif. — The crack of gunfire that left four people dead and one wounded in a mass shooting at an office complex in Orange stunned residents and officials.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Nathan Zachary, 18, who raced out to the scene near his apartment with his father. He said the north Orange neighborhood is “a safe, really safe area.”
He and his father stood curbside in flannel pajamas, trying to track the movement of the many police officers milling about.
“Hard to sleep,” Zachary said, “unless you know what’s going on.”
Camilo Akly, 28, couldn’t pick up his younger brother, who was hanging out with a buddy in a home facing the crime scene.
After walking several blocks to reach his sibling, he then saw “one by one by one of the police cars pulling up” followed by firefighters. He paused to try and make sense of the situation.
“You think that nothing could be going on during your evening, and all of a sudden, it changes really fast,” he said. “So much to be careful of these days.”
More neighbors, finished with dishwashing after dinner, spilled onto the sidewalk to videotape and posted footage on Facebook. The shooting occurred on a stretch of Lincoln Avenue with businesses on one side and a row of large apartment complexes on the other.
Few details about the shooting were immediately available. Officials said one of those killed was a child. The condition of the injured person was unknown. The gunman was injured and taken to a hospital.
Lt. Jennifer Amat, a spokeswoman for the Orange Police Department, said the city had not seen this kind of violence since 1997, when a mass shooting occurred at a Caltrans maintenance yard in the city. Five people were killed and at least two others wounded, including a police officer when a former state employee wielding an assault rifle opened fire there.
That gunman had been recently dismissed from the job and went to his former workplace with an AK-47 assault weapon. He was killed in a shootout with police at a nearby street corner.
The motive for Wednesday’s shooting was unclear.
One resident reported hearing two sets of gunshots about 5:30 p.m.
“I was just in my room hanging out. All of a sudden I heard five to seven gunshots go off,” the resident told KABC-TV. “And then I waited a couple minutes and the police came. And I heard a few more gunshots go off. It was a lot, quickly. Then the helicopter showed up and it was silent after that.”
