Crime spree that includes assault, stabbing and carjacking in Santa Ana leads to arrest of 4
Police were searching for the victim of a Monday night assault at a laundromat, an assault that police said prompted a carjacking from Santa Ana to Tustin.
At around 9:20 p.m. Santa Ana officers responded to the assault in a shopping center on Grand Avenue near Fairhaven Avenue. The male victim, in his teens or early 20s, called his mother saying he needed picked up, said Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna.
When she got there, he was being assaulted by at least four people and she took him away, Bertagna said.
While officers were en route to the laundromat, they received a call about a large fight in the street in the 2600 block of North Eastwood, which turned out to be where the assault victim and his mother live and had driven to, Bertagna said.
Authorities believe they may have been followed from the laundromat, with the fighting continued.
“During that melee, the mother is the victim of carjacking,” Bertagna said. “Suspects produce a knife, take her car and flee.”
The assault victim somehow fled, too, with police wanting to talk with him about the assault, including why it occurred.
Two other officers happened to be at a nearby stoplight and saw the mom’s car and begin a pursuit, following the car and stopping it in the 13300 of Flint Drive, an unincorporated area between Santa Ana and North Tustin. They arrested two boys and a girl on suspicion of carjacking and assault.
During the stop, police heard about a man in his 50s found stabbed in Tustin near Prospect Avenue and Norwood Park who later died. Police originally thought that stabbing might be linked to the earlier altercations but then discover it was not.
After the arrests of the juveniles, police learned that a man in his 20s showed up at Orange County Global Medical Center with stab wounds. Police determined he was one of the instigators of the earlier assault and arrested him on suspicion of that incident.