Police investigating woman's shooting death
ESCONDIDO -- Police are investigating the fatal shooting of a32-year-old woman in what the victim’s housemates say may have been a crime of passion by a spurned suitor. The shooting occurred at 10:26 p.m. Wednesday at the Malibu Terrace Apartments at 725 North Fig Street, near Mission Avenue, police Lt. Dave Mankin said.
Maria Louisa Montoya was shot seven times in the parking lot in front of three of her children as she talked on a cordless phone,residents of the apartment complex said Thursday. A medical examiner’s investigator confirmed Montoya was shot several times and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Witnesses told police Montoya had just stepped out of her apartment to talk with a friend when the gunman approached and shot her with a handgun without any known reason or provocation, police said.
Afterward, the gunman ran to a vehicle on Fig Street that appeared to be waiting for him and fled, police said. Montoya is survived by her parents, who live in Escondido, a medical examiner’s investigator said.
On Thursday, police were interviewing witnesses to try to get more information in the case.
Enedina Dominguez, a resident of the apartment complex, said Montoya and her five children had lived with Dominguez’s family for about a month.
Nicolas Manzano, Dominguez’s father-in-law, said he and other neighbors ran to Montoya after the shooting and found her lying int he parking lot of the apartment complex.
He said she was barely breathing and had three bullet wounds in her chest, one in her right arm and three in her left leg.
“The five children were grabbing their mother and crying,"Manzano said in Spanish.
A woman who lives in the complex asked Montoya who had shot her, but she only said, “It was a man,” before she died, Manzano said. Dominguez said Montoya had many male friends, and many men pursued her.
The shooting may have been linked to one of these men, she said. She added another resident of the apartment complex had threatened Montoya. “He wanted her to go out with him, and she only wanted to befriends,” Dominguez said in Spanish. “He told her if she wasn’t going to go out with him, she wasn’t going to go out with anybody. She told me he had threatened her, that he was going to kill her if she didn’t go out with him.”
However, Montoya’s children had told Dominguez and police that the gunman wasn’t the same man who had threatened Montoya, Dominguez said. The gunman may have been hired to kill Montoya by one of the men who wanted to date her, Dominguez said.
The Dominguez family didn’t know Montoya well -- she spent much of the day asleep and often went out at night, they said -- but she seemed depressed and often cried, Dominguez said.
Dominguez said Montoya had immigrated from Sinaloa, Mexico, to the United States when she was 16 years old and had married and given birth to her five children here. Montoya and her husband divorced two years ago, Dominguez said.
Dominguez’s daughter, Girasol Sanelias, 12, said she remembered Montoya talking fondly of her marriage. “She used to show me pictures of when she lived in her old house with her husband, and she showed me how happy she was,” Girasol said.
At the apartment complex Thursday afternoon, several residents said they were concerned about their safety after the shooting.
A small crowd of boys and a few other neighbors had gathered in the parking lot where the shooting had occurred. On a stone in a narrow grassy area between the parking lot and the apartment complex’s leasing office, several candles burned near the place where Montoya had been shot. They were placed there by neighbors in her memory.
