UPDATE: A suspect has been arrested (see end of post) . . .
Faustino Armenta, a 20-year-old in the Santa Ana Police Department gang database, was driving an older model van with passengers through a rival gang neighborhood when they zeroed in on a lone male, according to cops.
]
A confrontation ensued, the fellow whipped out a gun and several shots were fired into Armenta's chest.
The gunman ran away. Armenta's friends ran away. And when police arrived in the 900 block of South
Oak
Street in response to the 5:15 p.m. call of shots fired, all that was left was a bleeding Armenta and the van.
He was rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
UPDATE: During an unrelated parole search, gang detectives recognized 27-year-old Joseph Felix Diaz of Santa Ana as the suspected shooter of Armenta and arrested him.
The Orange County Register cites Superior Court records that show “a man with the same
name and birth-date” as Diaz “pleaded guilty to felony counts of grand theft,
conspiracy and assault in 2005, and a felony count of second degree
burglary in 2008.”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.