Police arrested two brothers and an 18-year-old for taking part
in a drive-by shooting Thursday afternoon, police said.
Police arrested two brothers and an 18-year-old for taking part in a drive-by shooting Thursday afternoon, police said. The arrests come as a respite from a grim series of violent incidents that have Gilroy residents, police and officials worried about a burgeoning gang war.
About 12:50 p.m. today, men riding in a black, two-door car opened fire on a brown SUV that was turning left on Monterey Street from IOOF Avenue. Witnesses said they saw at least three men, including the driver, in the car. Although the targeted car escaped unscathed, two cars parked in the lot of the Laundry Room laundromat on Monterey and a commercial and residential building next door were hit by bullets.
Police did not know if the SUV was hit or how many people were in the vehicle. No one has been reported injured yet, police said.
About 3 p.m., an officer spotted brothers Gabriel Juarez, 23, and Israel Juarez, 18, and Joshua Williams, 18, near Hadley Court in east Gilroy. They were sitting in the two-door sedan that had been spotted at the crime scene earlier this afternoon.
The three men were arrested for discharging a weapon at a vehicle, police said. Undisclosed evidence in the car linked them to the crime.
During the shooting, several bullets hit unoccupied parked cars and the occupied apartments, police said. Police marked off bullets casings lying in the driveway with orange cones, about 10 yards away from where shattered glass from the window of a parked black SUV sparkled on the ground.
Police said the people in both the vehicles exchanged some type of comment before the passengers in the black car began shooting.
More than a dozen police, including Police Chief Denise Turner, were on scene minutes after the incident. Though they set up a crime scene with tape, they did not close any streets. They have no suspects but questioned several witnesses in the area.
“I was born and raised in this town and to see the deterioration, it’s very disheartening,” said a woman who works at the Gilroy Visitor’s Bureau, situated on the corner of IOOF and Monterey. “No one has any regard.”
She preferred not to be named for fear of retaliation
She said her hands were shaking so hard she could barely pick anything up after she heard the shots. When she left for lunch, she was so flustered she forgot to put up a sign in the window like she usually does, she said.
“I was dumbfounded,” she said. “It was kind of duck and cover at that point.”
She said she heard four or five shots, but thought it was a car backfiring until she saw bursts of dust from where the bullets hit the second story of the apartment/office building across Monterey.
Ryan Bruno, who works at nearby Redman’s auto shop, said he was three blocks away at his Hanna Street home when the shooting took place. He heard the shots and thought they were from a nail gun at a construction site hear his house. When he went back to work, he learned that the sound was gunshots.
Police are aware of the tensions roiling in the community, Sgt. Jim Gillio said.
“We’ve definitely seen an uptick in violent crime that has culminated in the last week or so,” he said. “There was the stabbing over the weekend, the murder on Tuesday and the shooting today. At this point it’s too early to tell if they’re linked but we’re not ruling out the possibility.”
The shooting comes just two days after 18-year-old Larry Martinez was gunned down by three men in the middle of the day one block from the Gilroy Police Department. Over the weekend, a 21-year-old man was stabbed on the 7200 block of Monterey. Both are believed to be gang-related. Police are investigating whether today’s incident was also gang-related.
“There is a fear out there and when people heard the shots, they hit the floor,” Gillio said. “That there were unintended targets shows how dangerous a shooting can be.”
