LOS ANGELES — The gunman who killed four people, including a 9-year-old boy, at an Orange office park locked the gates to the complex with bike cable locks and was armed with a weapon as well as pepper spray and handcuffs, police said Thursday.
Authorities said the shooting occurred inside a business, Unified Homes, and the gunman and the victims were connected through business and personal ties. Wednesday’s attack was not random, they said.
Officers received a call at about 5:30 p.m. of shots fired at the business in the 200 block of West Lincoln Avenue. The officers encountered gunfire when they arrived and opened fire, Orange Police Lt. Jennifer Amat said.
Because the gates were locked, police officers responding to the scene fired through them and wounded the gunman, Amat said. Police had to use bolt cutters to get into the complex.
Officers found two victims in the courtyard, one of whom was the 9-year-old boy, and a woman who had also been shot and was taken to a hospital, where she remains in critical condition. The 9-year-old is believed to be the son of one of the victims who worked at the business.
Calling it a “horrific massacre,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said Thursday it appeared that the boy died in the arms of a woman who “was trying to save him.”
Police at the scene found three additional bodies: that of a woman on an upstairs outdoor landing, one man inside an office and one woman inside a separate office.
Police recovered a semi-automatic handgun and a backpack with pepper spray, handcuffs and ammunition, “which we believe belonged to the suspect,” Amat said Thursday.
The victims’ names have not been released because their next of kin have not all been notified, she said. The suspect is Aminadab Gaxiola Gonzalez, a 44-year-old Fullerton man who police said had a “business and personal relationship” with the victims.
Spitzer also noted that the crimes are subject to the death penalty. He has not made a decision about whether to seek death in this case.
“It is a horrible, horrible tragedy that Mr. Gonzalez made a decision to use deadly force to deal with issues he was dealing with in his life. So he will suffer and face the consequences,” Spitzer said.
Two police officers discharged their weapons at the scene, said Kimberly Edds, a spokeswoman for the Orange County district’s attorney’s office, which investigates officer-involved shootings. Both were wearing body cameras.
The Orange Police Department is conducting the investigation into the suspect and victims, Edds said, and will forward their reports to the district attorney’s office, which could bring charges against the suspect as soon as Thursday.
The district attorney’s investigation into the shooting could take “several months, up to a year,” she said. No officers were injured at the scene.
The incident — the third mass shooting in the United States in two weeks — stunned the quiet north Orange neighborhood.
Uvaldo Madrigal was in his office at Lincoln Body & Paint, his auto shop next to the shooting site, when he heard popping sounds.
“They sounded very low,” he said, “so I didn’t think they were gunshots.”
Then Madrigal heard about 10 shots, followed by silence. He looked outside and saw about five police cars in the middle of Lincoln Avenue and officers with their guns drawn.
He rushed to the back of his shop and told an employee to get inside. Several minutes later, the police told him and his employee that they needed to leave the area; as they did, Madrigal saw two people on stretchers being loaded into an ambulance.
“I don’t know what condition they were in,” he said. “Nothing like this has ever happened around here.”
Judging by the muffled sound of the shots, Madrigal thought the rounds were being fired indoors.
“Normally when you hear gunshots out in the open, they’re louder,” he said. “The gunshots just sounded lower; they sounded different.”
Scott Clark owns Calico Financial, located next door to Unified Homes inside the office complex. Reached by phone Thursday, Clark estimated that 30 or 40 people work in the building. Most businesses have two or three employees, he said, noting that Unified is probably the largest business in the complex with 10 or 12 people.
Most days, Clark leaves work around 6 p.m., but “for some reason, I guess God gave me a little angel to make me leave early last night, so I was out of there by 4:30,” he said. His staff was also gone by the time the shooting occurred.
Maria Reynoso, an agent at Unified Homes, said through tears Thursday that she didn’t want to speak to anyone.
The Orange violence came a week after a gunman opened fire at a Boulder, Colo., supermarket and two weeks after a massacre at three Atlanta-area spas.
“Horrifying and heartbreaking. Our hearts are with the families impacted by this terrible tragedy,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said of the Orange shooting Wednesday night.
Arianna Barrios, a City Council member in Orange, said the community was trying to get some sense of what had happened inside the office building on Wednesday.
“The new details issued by our police department this morning are horrifying and sickening,” she said. “I am grateful to our Orange Police officers for the quick response and believe their actions in all likelihood prevented additional lives from being lost. Orange is a strong, resilient community. The victims, their families and all who have been touched by this monstrous act of violence can depend on us to stand with them in this terrible time.”
Amat said the city had not seen this kind 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 wounded, including a police officer, when a former state employee wielding an assault rifle opened fire there.
That gunman had been recently dismissed from his 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.
Video footage of Wednesday’s scene captured by OnScene.TV showed a cluster of police and fire vehicles on the block, including at least five ambulances.
Paula Shaw, who lives nearby, told OnScene she was on her computer when she heard a “bunch of popping.”
“Sure enough, somebody was shooting over at the office building,” she said, noting that she heard about 10 shots.
