Gloria Perez said she doesn’t feel things are back to normal yet at Mission Gardens.
“There is something in the air, we haven’t been able to fully grasp what has happened,” she said in Spanish.
She has lived at the apartment complex for 20 years and nothing of this magnitude has ever happened, she said of the shooting last week that left two of her neighbors dead.
Shortly after 7:30 a.m. on May 28, Michael Eugene Majerus, 42, grabbed his AR-15 rifle, left his Mission Gardens apartment and gunned down his neighbor Nicholas Reynolds, 43, in the complex parking lot.
Police said the two men had an ongoing dispute but that there had been no known confrontation that morning.
The homicide led to an hours-long standoff with Chula Vista police, which ended when Majerus killed himself inside the E Street apartment he shared with his wife and two young children.
Perez said occasionally someone would call the police because a neighbor was playing their music loud late at night, or to report a suspicious person in the complex.
But, she said, she still has no idea how something like this happened in a complex where residents are respectful toward one another. She said most residents living in the complex are seniors who have lived there for more than 10 years.
But for Jose Carrasco, who was out of town when the shooting happened, life in the apartment complzzex has almost returned to its everyday routine.
He said when he first got back home two days after the incident neighbors filled him in on the events that had transpired.
“Everything seems to be normal,” he said. “I don’t think it is going to change how people are going to be with each other.”
He also described the apartment complex as “calm” and that what happened was a personal issue between two neighbors.
Carrasco said he had friendly interactions with both men before last week and he never imagined the two neighbors had an issue with each other because they were so nice to him.
“I’ve seen the two guys and they would say hello every morning,” he said. “They were very nice, like all the residents here.”
Carrasco, who has lived in Mission Gardens for 10-years, said he cannot ever remember a time when the police have been called out.
Time and again, residents who live in the green apartment complex or nearby houses said the area is relatively calm.
On the day of the shooting Stephany Melendez said she woke up to take her son to a doctor’s appointment. All of a sudden she heard loud pops she thought were created by a construction crew working on the nearby street. She didn’t realize what she had actually heard were gunshots.
Melendez lives a few homes down from the apartments and said police are hardly ever called to her neighborhood.
She was shocked to hear about the events that ultimately left two men dead.
“I wouldn’t imagine something like that happening so close to my home,” she said.
Melendez said in the past police have gone by a few times because a car had run into a corner house, not because of criminal activity.
The situation became real to her when she said saw police blocking the streets with their weapons drawn.
“It was panic, it was terror,” she said about seeing the police blocking the streets.
John Moreno said he was on his way to the airport to drop off a relative the morning of the shooting. He said as he was walking to his car he heard gunshots ring out.
“We heard about six of them and they were really, really loud,” he said. “We were in the other parking lot from where it happened. We then got in the car and heard four more (shots), so there were about 10 gun shots and they were very loud,” he said.
Moreno said he served in the military so when he heard the gunshots he knew it didn’t come from a small caliber gun.
Moreno said he was one of the people to call 9-1-1 to report the sound of gunshots.
On his way home from the airport, streets were closed off, but he said he needed to get his brother, who was home alone and mentally handicapped, out of the house.
He said a SWAT officer escorted him to his apartment to get his brother.
Moreno then went with his brother to the Norman Park Senior Center where the American Red Cross provided snacks and water to residents who had been cleared out by police as a precautionary measure.
In the late afternoon, about an hour after Majerus let his wife and children out of the apartment, a single gunshot rang out. Majerus was dead from a self-inflicted gunshot, police said.
Almost a week since the murder and suicide, Perez is still trying to wrap her mind around it all. “I still can’t believe what happened,” she said.
Perez said no one should be blamed for what happened.
“I feel for both men and their families,” she said. “This is not something where you can only feel sorry for one side and not the other.”
