Parking attendant witnessed gang brawl

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

It appeared to Tucker Papac that Nacho had his bell rung. After all, he had a bloody nose and blood on his shirt.
“I saw him fall down. I didn’t see him get stabbed. I had no idea he got stabbed until it was too late. I thought he fell down and I thought he was going to hop back up.”
Fifteen-year-old Luis Angel Linares never got up. He was stabbed to death, the lone fatality of the March 14 clash between east and west side Santa Barbara gangs.

Papac, 30, a parking lot attendant at Saks Fifth Avenue, at State and Carrillo streets, where the battle broke out at about 2:30 p.m., saw the teen collapse into a planter close to where he was standing.
Papac who has lived in Santa Barbara for 12 years and has been a parking lot attendant for Saks for 5 years, asked not to be photographed.
Before Linares collapsed, Papac said he saw Linares and some kids sprint into the parking lot on Carrillo Street, behind the store.
“His friends tried to get him up and he fell back down. That was about it,” he said in an interview with a Sound reporter on June 18.
Papac said he heard a youth say, “I’m not going to leave Nacho.” He said Nacho appeared to be Linares’ nickname.
“One [kid] tried to help him up, and [Linares] tried to get up, but he fell back down,” Papac said.
“There were a couple of them that were sticking around, but as soon as the cops pulled up, they took off, too.”
Papac said he has seen several gang fights in the area on previous occasions.
“To me it didn’t seem like it was as big a deal as it ended up being because you’d seen them before, but they never had weapons or anything,” he said.
In a recent interview, SBPD Detective-Sergeant Bernie Gaona, a gang unit supervisor, said there have been several “quick fights” in that area where school children gather near the bus depot.
This time, Papac said he had a feeling that the sheer number of young people gathering on Carrillo and State streets might explode into a serious confrontation.
“It seemed to me that day everybody knew that there was going to be a fight down here,” he said. “There were kids that were hanging out down here that weren’t even involved in the fight. They just knew to be down here it seemed like to me.”
The electricity building at the scene was so unusual, he said, a store customer asked if a gang fight was under way before it had even begun.
Papac said he never saw Ricardo “Ricky” Juarez, 14, the youth charged with the murder, or a knife. He said he did observe blood on the victim.
“He [Linares] had a bloody nose and, then, he had blood on his shirt. That’s what I saw and I thought the blood on his shirt was from the bloody nose, which was why I thought he was going to bounce back up -- like maybe he just got his bell rung or fell down.
“I just thought he’d get back up and take off because, by then, you could hear sirens coming.”