Park Gunman Kills Man Over Card Game’s Kitty : Van Nuys: The victim is a laid-off factory worker who had brought his family from Mexico for a better life.

Four or five times a week, Julian Ramirez Contreras frittered away the balmy summer twilights at the park outside the Van Nuys Recreation Center. Sitting in folding picnic chairs or squatting on the grass, Contreras and others from his hometown of Zacatecas, Mexico, played cards and swapped stories until night fell and they returned to the cramped immigrant apartments that surround the park.

But about 9:15 p.m. Wednesday, as Contreras, 51, and his compadres tapered off their yarns and finished up their game, a robber with a pistol walked up and demanded the kitty from the card game.

Contreras rose from his chair to question the man and was shot several times in the chest and back.

“That was his answer,” Los Angeles Police Detective Paul Stewart said.

The gunman grabbed the few dollars on the grass before the stunned group and dashed into the darkness. Contreras, who brought his family north to California three years ago in search of a better life, died in the emergency room at Northridge Hospital Medical Center a short time later.

“He didn’t try to resist,” Stewart said. “He wasn’t any more involved than any of the other guys. He just happened to stand up.”

Police were searching Thursday for Contreras’ killer, who witnesses said talked briefly with the men playing cards a few minutes before the shooting. Stewart would not characterize the nature of that conversation, but said it may have aggravated the gunman.

Contreras had worked until three months ago at a Chatsworth paint factory, but was laid off and had spent the summer looking for work to support his family, seven of whom live in a two-bedroom apartment a few blocks from the park. He worked for 30 years as a cook in Chicago, sending money to his family in Mexico, before he moved to Los Angeles three years ago and sent for his family.

“He was a regular dad,” Contreras’ 15-year-old daughter, Alicia, said. “He was not that funny, not that serious. He worked hard to support our family.”

Contreras went to the park several times a week, generally walking there about 4 p.m. and heading home about 9 p.m. “It was cooler and men from my city from Mexico used to go there and sit there,” Alicia said.