UPDATED: The murder victim is identified. So is the murder suspect (updates throughout) . . .
Santa Ana Police received reports of shots fired in the 500 block of West St. Andrew Place just after 2:30 a.m. Sunday. Officers arrived to find a white SUV with the target of that gunfire inside: 19-year-old Herman Ochoa. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
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Police says Ochoa was sitting in the driver's seat when two or three people approached the SUV, words were exchanged and the teen was shot several times. Jesus Salas, also 19, was arrested Sunday on suspicion of killing Ochoa. Cops say Salas and Ochoa were gang members and that the suspect's accomplices are being sought.
Ochoa is the second teen found alone and shot to death inside a car in Santa Ana since Sept. 15, when Eddie Jurado Duran, 14, was discovered dead behind the driver's seat of a stolen red 1990 Toyota Camry in an alley in the 1800 block of South Cedar
Street. Police say that killing was also gang related and that Duran belonged to a gang.
Those leaving comments about Duran's slaying, including members of his family, deny the boy was a gang member. Some have also accused Santa Ana Police as being tied to the hit because Duran's family had recently filed a harassment claim against the department. Santa Ana Police vehemently deny the allegations.
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.