Detectives worked Thursday to track down a man who pulled a gun and opened fire inside an Otay Mesa fast-food restaurant following a dispute with staffers there, killing one employee and wounding two others.
The unidentified assailant shot up the Church’s Chicken outlet in the 3700 block of Del Sol Boulevard about 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, according to San Diego police.
The shooter then ran out of the business, got into a dark-blue sedan and sped off to the north on Picador Boulevard, said Lt. Martha Sainz.
Medics took the victims to trauma centers, where one of them, identified by family members as 28-year-old Maribel Ibanez of San Diego, was pronounced dead.
The other two wounded workers were hospitalized in stable condition, Sainz said. Authorities have not released the men’s names.
Witnesses told investigators the assailant — described as a thin, roughly 6-foot black man in his 30s, wearing a light-blue sweatshirt and a blue Chargers-logo knit cap — got into an argument with staffers at the restaurant near State Route 905 after ordering food and getting caught trying to pass a counterfeit bill.
He then angrily left, but returned a few minutes later, confronted employees and started shooting.
David Walker, an employee at a nearby 7-Eleven store, described hearing about five gunshots.
“It sounded like firecrackers,” Walker told reporters. “And that’s what I thought it was at first — the first two. And then it kept going.”
Walker rushed over to the restaurant and used his belt as a tourniquet on one of the wounded men, CBS8 reported.
A GoFundMe.com page set up to help Ibanez’s family with funeral expenses memorialized her as “a loving daughter, sister and aunt” who had recently married.
— City News Service