UPDATE, JULY 7, 8:59 P.M.:Kevin Jacobo has been identified as the driver who was shot to death in the car-to-car shooting on a Santa Ana residential street early Sunday.
The 20-year-old Santa Ana resident had no known ties to gangs “whatsoever,” Santa Ana Police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna told City News Service. “So at this point we don't know if he was the intended target or just a victim of random violence.”
Wild Fourth of July Includes a Slaying and Three Fires Across Orange County
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ORIGINAL POST, JULY 6, 6:38 A.M.: An earlier post mentioned someone being shot dead in Santa Ana on the Fourth of July.
About 4 ½ hours later, at 2:12 a.m. Sunday, a 21-year-old man driving his girlfriend in his vehicle through a residential street was shot by the occupants of another moving car.
The girlfriend called police and paramedics took the unidentified man suffering from a gunshot wound in critical condition to UCI Medical Center in Orange.
According to the county coroner, he died at 9:04 a.m. Sunday. Identification is pending notification of next of kin.
The preliminary investigation discovered the gunfire came from a stock, two-door, white Honda Civic with two people inside. It immediately fled the area of the shooting: the 2300 block of West Harvard Street. The shot-up car was discovered on a curving residential street, a block away from Valley High School, not far from Warner Avenue at Fairview Street on Santa Ana's southwest side.
Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to call Santa Ana Police homicide detectives at 714.245.8390 or Orange County Crime Stoppers at 855.847.6227 (855-TIP-OCCS), via occrimestoppers.org or by texting to 274637 (C-R-I-M-E-S) from a cell phone. (All text messages should begin with the letters “OCCS”.)
Three mornings before the shooting, there was a scene you don't (hopefully) see every day at the intersection of Ross Avenue and Civic Center Drive: a man swinging a pickaxe.
Police responding to the 9:06 a.m. call took the fellow into custody and discovered he'd done more than just brandish the pickaxe. Someone had been taking photographs of homeless people, which apparently upset the fellow who chased the photographer with the weapon, according to police. The suspect, identified as Isaiah Gassaway, 23, of Santa Ana, had also been seen inside a vehicle that was reported stolen in Santa Ana, cops add.
As the incident was happening with the photographer, someone else began recording on a cellphone, which allegedly prompted Gassaway to confront the videographer with his pickaxe and demand the phone. The second victim refused and entered his vehicle to drive off. Gassaway is accused of hitting the vehicle with the axe and causing minor damage.
He was arrested on suspicion of attempted assault with a deadly weapon, attempted robbery and possession of stolen property (the vehicle).
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
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.