Local law enforcement officers arrested a Hollister man after he
held his 8-year-old daughter against her will with a gun
Wednesday.
Local law enforcement officers arrested a Hollister man after he held his 8-year-old daughter against her will with a gun Wednesday.
Hollister police officers were dispatched to 21 Gonzalez Dr. around 7 p.m. on a report that Edward Hernandez, 40, was holding his daughter hostage in a trailer on the property, had a gun in his possession and had been drinking, according to a statement issued by the police department.
Hernandez and his girlfriend, Tina Cuneo, had been arguing for about a half hour when Hernandez took the child into the trailer and produced a realistic-looking pellet gun and a bag full of live ammunition, said Hollister Police Sgt. Carlos Reynoso.
“He told her to tell her what I have, and the little girl yelled out (to her mother) ‘he has a gun,'” Reynoso said. “At that point, she called the police.”
After contacting the police, Hernandez let the child go, left the residence and began walking toward Buena Vista Road, according to the statement.
Hollister Police Officer Rick Uribe and San Benito County Sheriff Deputy Dave Zander located Hernandez on Buena Vista Road near Calaveras School, ordered him to stop and then chased him into an orchard when he did not obey their orders, according to the statement.
As the officers were chasing him, he pulled a black revolver from his waistband, but when Uribe and Zander took cover he dropped the gun and continued to run deeper into the orchard. The officers finally caught up to Hernandez, tackled him and arrested him, according to the statement.
The gun Hernandez had dropped during the incident was made to look like a Ruger Revolver or a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, Reynoso said.
“This guy came very, very close to getting shot,” Reynoso said. “People have these toy guns and want to intimidate and scare people, but when cops are involved we sometimes don’t have the time to discover whether it’s real or not.”
Many realistic-looking bb-guns or pellet guns will have orange tips to distinguish them from real firearms, but Hernandez’s gun didn’t have this marking, Reynoso said.
“Playing with toy guns is the same thing as playing with a real one,” he said.
Hernandez was arrested for assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment and resisting arrest and booked into the San Benito County Jail.
