Orange police arrested a man for felon in possession of a firearm early Thursday morning after seeing a car park in a vacant field at 10th and Curtis streets. The officers also found several medical syringes in the man’s backpack.
Officer J.O. Lemoine reported he was on patrol with Officer D.B. Mulhollan when they saw a 2005 Buick without lights drive into the vacant space at 3 a.m. They saw a man and woman walking away and stopped them.
Lemoine said he saw the man putting his left hand into the left pocket of his shorts. The officer told the man to remove his hand and asked if he had a gun. The man said he did and the officer confiscated it and secured it in the patrol SUV.
The gun was a Stoeger Cougar 8040 F semi-automatic pistol that had been reported stolen in Orange in March 2019. Officer Lemoine also found the syringes, called “rigs” in drug slang, in the man’s backpack.
38-year-old David Lee Trujillo of Orange had two previous felony burglary convictions, according to police, and was arrested for illegal possession of a firearm by a felon.
The woman with Trujillo was not arrested. Lemoine reported a man and woman were in the Buick. The officers searched the car and found nothing illegal.
The officer reported that at the Orange County Jail, the arrested man said they had parked the car to go to a house next to the field and the other man had asked him to carry the gun inside the house.
Also on Thursday, a burglary was reported at Spanky’s restaurant, 1703 16th Street. Police went to the business about 9 p.m. for a complaint about an unforced burglary earlier that had happened that morning. No other details were available from police.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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