“I thought this side of the town was the safest,” 52-year-old Annette Blanco said.
Blanco was inside of her relative’s home during the evening of Jan. 25 when she thought she heard fireworks, but was too afraid to look outside. They were actually gunshots.
Responding to a report of gunshots at 9:45 p.m., police officers from the Santa Maria Police Department rushed to the corner of South Elizabeth and Church streets where they found two men inside of a vehicle bleeding from gunshot wounds.
But it wasn’t too long after paramedics arrived that both men were declared dead on the scene.
A little more than six hours before, at around 3:30 p.m., officers and paramedics were at the 1600 block of E. Donovan where a 15-year-old by name of Marcos Arce Ramos was stabbed to death.
After searching the area, the police officers arrested a man and a juvenile who they found hiding in the riverbed nearby. One is 19-year-old Israel Gaspar Cruz and the other is a 14-year-old male. Both were arrested and booked into jail on suspicion of murder.
However, according to SMPD Lt. Dan Cohen, the police have not named any suspects in the double homicide, which is being investigated by detectives.
It’s the third double homicide in less than a span of a month (and the fifth homicide in January alone and seventh overall since Dec. 26), and nearby residents are beginning to feel unsafe. Police haven’t named any suspects in the previous double homicides either.
One person, identified only as Maria, was inside of her home near the corner of Central and Elizabeth streets when she said her stepson heard eight to 10 gunshots.
She stepped outside a few minutes later and saw a police officer pulling a man out of a vehicle on the corner of South Elizabeth and Church. Within minutes, the area was flooded with police, firefighters, and paramedics.
All of the killings in such a short period of time have her scared.
“It’s been too much,” she said. “It’s been scary.”
Blanco, who lives east of Broadway, said the homicides are not typical for this neighborhood. There is a church nearby.
“It’s getting bad now,” Blanco told the Sun, adding that she doesn’t go past her doorstep when going out of her house at night. “When I grew up, we weren’t afraid to play at night. But now I’m going to be more cautious when stepping outside.”
This article appears in Jan 28 – Feb 4, 2016.