Man Arrested After 5-Hour Standoff at Office Tower in Orange

Sebastian Zamora burst from a 14th-floor stairwell of the Orange Tower office building at 10:10 a.m. Monday and blurted, “Dude, there’s a maniac on the roof! He just pulled a gun on me!”

After warning the two construction workers he encountered, Zamora fled to call police while the gunman, later identified as Robert Carlos Herrera, 22, of Placentia, rambled into a walkie-talkie he had stolen from Zamora.

He weaved crazily along the edge of the roof, occasionally waving and twirling what appeared to be a long silver pistol.

For five hours and 40 minutes, about 700 other people--including Rodney G. King--were trapped inside the green and gray glass office tower at North State College Boulevard and Orangewood Avenue, and in nearby restaurants and parking garages.

SWAT teams that moved in to confront the distraught gunman closed off the normally busy, 10-lane State College Boulevard and sealed off roads along a two-block perimeter around the building.

Zamora, a building engineer for Equity Owned Properties, the building owner, said Herrera lured him to the roof by telling him he was a building inspector.

King and his attorney were at a meeting at the Judicial Arbitration Mediation Services on the sixth floor.

“The buzzers went off, and they just told us to stay in our seats and lock the doors,” King said later. “It was scary.”

Police said Herrera was despondent because he was worried that he was about to be fired from his job and lose his girlfriend.

About 3:30 p.m., as police were preparing to toss a phone to him, he pried open the roof door and peered into the stairwell below, according to Orange police communications supervisor Gilbert Carreon.

“Hey man, you want to come down and talk to us?” Carreon said one of the police SWAT team members shouted. Herrera agreed, and the tense barricade ended. His weapon, it turned out, was a BB-gun. Herrera was arrested and charged with robbery--of the walkie-talkie.