‘Angel Was Innocent,’ Uncle Says of Slain Teen-Ager

SANTA ANA —  Sixteen-year-old Angel Brito-Guadarrama went to Fairview Villas to visit a cousin Monday night. His uncle says the trip cost him his life.

“He went over there because he has a bunch of cousins living over there,” said Cleto Brito-Guadarrama, who shared an apartment with his nephew and Angel’s older brother, Luis, 19. “He was a good boy. He had a job and he paid his own bills.”

When a gunman opened fire on Angel and several other young men as they stood near a bank of pay telephones shortly after 10 p.m., the teen-ager turned and tried to run. But after 25 yards, he collapsed and died from three bullet wounds in the chest, one of three victims in what police suspect was a drug-related shooting.

“Angel was innocent, he had nothing, nothing at all to do with any drugs,” his uncle insisted Tuesday.

The handsome lad with thick, dark hair, like his brother before him, left Mexico to escape its poverty, the uncle said. His parents, who remained in Iguala, a small pueblo in the Mexican state of Guerrero, where Angel grew up, are so poor that “they can’t even afford to pay the local mill to grind their corn,” the youth’s uncle said.

Angel was a worldly teen-ager and owned a car he had bought from his earnings as a day laborer at construction sites in Orange County. He had been in the United States only 11 months, his uncle said.

Although he was only 16, Angel lied to prospective employers, saying he was 18. His uncle said the youth used his older brother’s immigration card to persuade employers that he was of age and in the United States legally.

Relatives said he was a happy teen-ager, more involved in physical exercise and weight-lifting than the sort of violence that claimed his life.

“I called his parents by telephone and gave them the news that he had been shot to death. Now we don’t know how we’re going to pay to have him shipped out of here and back to Mexico where the family wants to bury him,” the uncle said.

Luis, who had accompanied Angel to Fairview Villas from their apartment on South Euclid Street in Santa Ana, ran to his brother’s aid after Angel had been shot. But Angel did not respond.

“I was calling for help,” said Luis Brito-Guadarrama, sitting on a stairway within the same complex Tuesday, wearing tennis shoes splattered with his brother’s blood. “But no one helped me.”

Police hesitated to say whether Angel was an innocent party to the fatal shooting. Santa Ana Police Lt. Robert Helton said police investigators were trying to unravel the evidence and interview witnesses.

The other two dead men were Mario David Mora, 23, of Santa Ana, and Noel Herrera Arroyo, 20, of Santa Ana. Miguel Angel Toledo Soto, 22, who was shot in the head, remained in serious condition at UCI Medical Center in Orange, a hospital spokeswoman said.

At the apartment of Angel’s uncle, several of the youth’s relatives tried to make sense of the violent shooting that took the young man’s life. Most blamed the growing drug epidemic, which they said is consuming that part of Santa Ana’s Latino community.

“You want my opinion?” said Fabian Reyessa, who is married to a cousin of Angel’s. “This is all a consequence of the drug problem. I used to live in those same apartments, and that’s all you see over there every day is people selling drugs. I had a (truck) battery stolen and I had my truck stolen. It’s a bad place to raise a family.”