Gunman Held After 7-Hour Standoff : Sniper: SWAT team storms Brea apartment after occupant fired about 50 gunshots from second-story site. He suffers only minor cuts. Authorities call it ‘a miracle’ no one is hit in barrage of bullets.
BREA — An unemployed chef and divorced father was arrested late Wednesday night after a seven-hour standoff with police during which he sporadically sprayed an apartment complex with about 50 gunshots while holed up in his apartment, police and witnesses said.
The man suffered only minor cuts, and no one was injured from the eruptions of gunfire, which began before 5 p.m. and lasted throughout the night, Brea police said.
The standoff had begun when maintenance workers responding to a second-story flood in the apartment discovered the gunman, and told witnesses they saw blood in the kitchen. It ended when a Orange County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team and other officers invaded the apartment about 11:25 p.m. after two hours without hearing from the man.
“It’s definitely a miracle that this has concluded with no injuries, considering how many people were around and the number of shots fired,†said Brea Police Capt. Tom Christian, tactical commander of the operation.
Scores of residents of the sprawling, tree-lined Raintree Apartments on Tamarack Avenue were evacuated--though one 13-year-old boy was ordered to stay in his apartment for hours for fear he would be hit by bullets--as about 25 officers tried to negotiate with the man.
Police did not identify the suspect, but many neighbors said they believed it was Hector Walters, about 40. Nancy Carrillo, Walters’ former longtime partner and mother of his 11-year-old daughter, confirmed that it was him.
“He’s just lost it right now. I think he’s just, I don’t know what to call it. He’s psychotic at this point,†Carrillo said in a telephone interview Wednesday night as she huddled in her own home with her child. “I’m numb. I’ve just lost it . . . I want to lose it, but I can’t because I need to be strong for my daughter.
“My main concern is for them to get him out of there and get him some help, mental help,†Carrillo added. “I told the officers I don’t think he’ll come out fighting. . . . People act out differently. I cry. He’s doing this.â€
After setting up a makeshift command center in the complex’s clubhouse, police told reporters and the throngs of neighbors that the man had turned on all the taps in his apartment, flooding it, and periodically was breaking furniture.
Brea Police Capt. Bill Lentini said he believed the gunman was using “multiple weapons,†including a semiautomatic handgun, and that the blood in the apartment came from his cutting himself.
“It’s been random--through windows, doors, walls and roofs,†Brea Police Officer Mario Vaughn said of the shots. “Every time we get close to talking to this guy, he starts shooting again.â€
Walters’ phone wasn’t working because of the flooding, so police were communicating with him via bullhorn and yelling.
About 10 p.m., he finally yelled back, “ ‘I’m frightened,’ †police said. They were able to give him a cellular phone about that time.
Walters’ father, sister, brother and friends were on the scene.
Some 80 neighbors hovered in the darkened parking lot of the complex, chatting on cellular phones, straining to hear police scanners, and swapping war stories about how many gunshots they had heard themselves.
A pregnant woman 10 days overdue and in labor was escorted from the complex by police about 10 p.m.
Art and Kiesha Borquez were continually dialing their 13-year-old son Aaron, who was hiding between a love seat and an aquarium in the family apartment in a different building from Walters’ but with windows just yards away.
Art Borquez had left his son alone in the apartment about 4:15 p.m. when he went to pick up Kiesha; when he returned, police had blocked the entrance to his apartment and would not let him fetch his son.
“This is not supposed to be happening,†Aaron, a seventh-grader at Brea Junior High, said over the phone from his perch, before emerging just before 10 p.m. “I was scared.â€
Aaron Borquez said he heard a brief argument before the gunfire erupted.
“Somebody said, ‘Get out,’ and the other person said, ‘You get out,’ and that’s when I heard the shots,†Aaron said. At one point, he added, “there were five shots in five seconds.†Shortly after his father left to pick up his mother, Aaron said, the police said, “ ‘Hector, come downstairs with your hands up.’ â€
Other neighbors said they heard 10, 20, or 30 shots fired at a time as they came home from work and began cooking dinner Wednesday afternoon.
“I stepped outside and he was shooting rounds off. A couple of bullets whizzed by†and hit a tree. “I went back inside because I didn’t want to get hit by a bullet,†said Matt Roberts, 28, Walters’ next-door neighbor, who was cooking stew when he first heard gunfire. “It’s pretty intense. This is Brea. This kind of thing just doesn’t go on. But you have people who snap, and that’s it.â€
A press release from Brea Police Chief James E. Oman indicated that Raintree maintenance workers entered Walters’ apartment, No. 3604, about 5 p.m. Wednesday. “They heard a male voice yelling incoherently at them and then the sound of gunshots,†the release said.
Brad Halderman, 40, who lives downstairs from Walters, said that upon arriving home from work he found a pair of Levis and white socks in the flower bed, apparently tossed out of the upstairs window, which was missing. Inside his apartment, Halderman said, water was dripping all over the kitchen and the phone was not working.
Halderman said he heard the gunman say, “Go away and leave me alone,†then heard three shots fired. “I didn’t even know he had a gun,†Halderman added later.
Neighbors said Walters had lived in the complex for about eight months, first in a studio in another building, more recently sharing an apartment with his sister, Helen. He lost his job a few weeks ago, his former wife said. Neighbors said his daughter often visited and they would toss a football.
Elaine Sevesind, 39, who worked for Walters several years ago while he was a cafeteria supervisor at La Habra Villa Retirement Home, went to the apartment complex after seeing the scene on television. She and her husband, Rod, last saw Walters over dinner at a Black Angus restaurant in March.
“He’s been depressed for awhile about relationship and jobs,†Rod Sevesind said.
Though they have been separated for about a decade, Carrillo said she and Walters, high school sweethearts who met when they were 16, have remained in close contact.
Walters’ often made cookies for his child’s schoolmates, and last year coached her baseball team, Carrillo said. Just Tuesday, he took her to the doctor for a throat infection. “If ever there was a daddy’s girl, this is her,†Carrillo said.
Carrillo said she spoke with Walters earlier Wednesday, and that his sister, Helen, had seen him about 2:30 p.m. Wednesday before leaving the apartment to do an errand.
Roberts, the next-door neighbor, said he saw Walters just a few hours before the shots began.
“He had a strange attitude,†Roberts recalled. “I said hi to him, and he just turned his head away and kept walking. But I didn’t think he’d start shooting rounds off.â€
Times staff writer Diane Seo contributed to this story.
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