Homicide

A homicide was reported early Saturday at the Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa Hotel, police Sgt. Jerry Hildeman said. He said detectives are still piecing together the murder, which was reported at 1:57 a.m. at the hotel, 3050 Bristol St.

Costa Mesa police are asking for residents' help investigating a homicide that took place on or shortly before Friday. Police discovered the body of 57-year-old Hans Ebel about 10 a.m. Friday after a resident reported what appeared to be a man sleeping behind a business in the 1500 block of Newport Boulevard. When officers arrived, they found the victim dead and that he appeared to have suffered blunt-force trauma to his body. The victim appeared to be transient, police said.

Police are investigating the death of a woman found inside a Newport Beach hotel room after they arrested the room’s occupant for possessing and selling narcotics, but the Orange County Coroner’s Office said today the case did not appear to be homicide. Police arrested Stephen Royds, 46, of Newport Beach Thursday night for allegedly selling narcotics. When officers searched Royds’ room in the Fairmont Newport Beach at 4500 MacArthur Blvd., they found narcotics and the woman’s fully clothed “well preserved” body in a container filled with dry ice, police said.

The woman found dead under Newport Beach's Bay Bridge this week died of a gunshot wound, an autopsy confirmed Wednesday. Officials had called the death of 28-year-old Nancy Hammour "suspicious" since passersby found her body Monday morning, but Newport police have reclassified the case as a homicide, said department spokeswoman Jennifer Manzella. At 8:45 a.m. Monday, police responded to a call about a body found underneath the Bay Bridge near East Coast Highway and Bayside Drive.

Marisa O'Neil Prosecutors on Friday said a man who told police he bought a boat from a retired couple just before they disappeared is now the prime suspect in their murder and in another, unrelated homicide. Long Beach resident Skylar DeLeon, 25, appeared in court Friday at a pretrial hearing on an unrelated grand theft charge. But before the hearing took place, Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Matt Murphy told the judge that DeLeon is also "the main suspect in a double homicide in Newport Beach."

Esther Gordon said she’s devastated by the loss of a beloved Costa Mesa family’s son who grew up with her children. Norman Schureman, 50, a professor at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design, was gunned down while at a Persian New Year celebration March 20. His funeral was Saturday, and he was memorialized Sunday. “There’s nothing I can say other than the fact that it’s a sad, sad situation, such a loss, such an untimely death,” Gordon said.

Bound and gagged, trapped in a basement. All you can make of your kidnappers is that they barely look old enough to drive. Everyone loves a good homicide -- how did they do it, what is the motive? The classic murder mystery has taken a twisted turn in the past few years. For some reason moviegoers would rather be baffled by the why and how of Jack the Ripper instead of the who in Nancy Drew. If you love the morbid and do not mind waiting awhile for an outcome, I recommend the psychological suspense thriller "Murder By Numbers."

Newport Beach police are looking for connections between an unsolved homicide in their city and recently revealed serial killings in Orange County but have not found any links, a department official said Tuesday. "At this point it does not seem that there are obvious ties between the two, but of course [detectives will] do a full investigation," Newport Beach Police Department spokeswoman Jennifer Manzella said. For more than a year, Newport police have been investigating the death of Tina Hoang.

Until this year, I seldom gave a thought to domestic violence. It never involved my wife or me, nor did I know of any friends who were beating one another up. Basically, domestic violence didn't exist for me until last February when I volunteered for the Larimer County Sheriff's Victim Response Team. I haven't kept track of all the call-outs, but I'm sure at least half our business involves helping victims of domestic violence, almost all of whom are women or their children.

L.D. 'Dean' Pollom L.D. "Dean" Pollom, a longtime Costa Mesa resident and former Costa Mesa Police captain, died Wednesday in his Hemet home of congestive heart failure. He was 76. Pollom was one of the first eight officers to be hired to the Costa Mesa Police Department when it was established in 1954. He was a skilled investigator who solved several high-profile homicide cases, said his friend and former colleague Mike Healey. "He was inquisitive and had that desire to obtain all the facts," he said.

Newport Beach police are looking for connections between an unsolved homicide in their city and recently revealed serial killings in Orange County but have not found any links, a department official said Tuesday. "At this point it does not seem that there are obvious ties between the two, but of course [detectives will] do a full investigation," Newport Beach Police Department spokeswoman Jennifer Manzella said. For more than a year, Newport police have been investigating the death of Tina Hoang.

A homicide victim found in Newport Beach previously sold drugs for a gang tied to the Mexican Mafia, according to a federal grand jury indictment released Tuesday. Nancy Hammour, whose body was found under the Newport Bay Bridge on Labor Day, sold methamphetamine for a gang that operated in Orange County between March 2011 and June 2012, according to the indictment. Hammour, 28, of Santa Ana, was one of dozens of defendants swept up in a wide-ranging multiagency investigation targeting gangs operating in Orange County.

Homicide detectives are investigating the deaths of two children found inside a hotel Saturday morning after a woman who crashed her car in an apparent suicide attempt in Costa Mesa alerted authorities about the children. The unidentified woman rammed her vehicle at high speed into steel poles at about 8 a.m. while attempting to crash into an electric vault behind a Home Depot in the 2300 block of Harbor Boulevard, said Sgt. Tim Starn of the Costa Mesa Police Department. "She was definitely trying to kill herself," he said.

The woman found dead under Newport Beach's Bay Bridge this week died of a gunshot wound, an autopsy confirmed Wednesday. Officials had called the death of 28-year-old Nancy Hammour "suspicious" since passersby found her body Monday morning, but Newport police have reclassified the case as a homicide, said department spokeswoman Jennifer Manzella. At 8:45 a.m. Monday, police responded to a call about a body found underneath the Bay Bridge near East Coast Highway and Bayside Drive.

A 20-year-old woman found dead in March in Newport Beach was the victim of a homicide, officials said Monday. The Orange County coroner's recently office determined Tina Hoang was a murder victim, Newport Beach police spokeswoman Kathy Lowe said. Lowe declined to release the cause of death, citing the integrity of the ongoing investigation. The coroner's report did not change the scope of the department's investigation, which the NBPD investigated as a suspicious death from the start, Lowe said.

The Orange County district attorney's office said Monday that it would hold off on filing criminal charges against Christopher Dorner in connection with the double homicide in Irvine that launched the manhunt across Southern California for the former LAPD officer. Dorner, 33, is suspected of killing Monica Quan and Keith Lawrence. The two were found shot to death Feb. 3 in a car in a parking lot of an upscale condominium complex near Concordia University, where both received degrees and played basketball.

A Newport Coast businessman has been arrested on suspicion of killing his wife, police said Friday. Peter Gregory Chadwick, 48, a business executive, was arrested Thursday in San Diego, near the Mexican border and booked in connection with death of his wife, Quee "Q.C. " Chadwick, 46, police said. The victim's body had not yet been found and police declined to say how they knew Quee Chadwick was dead. Peter Chadwick called San Diego police from State Route 905 at Picador Boulevard on Thursday, a day after officers found signs of foul play inside the Chadwicks' multimillion-dollar home.

Costa Mesa police arrested a man and woman Wednesday in connection to a stabbing death that took place in early September, according to a department news release. Police found and arrested Adolph Guadalupe Mireles, 38, of Huntington Beach, and Madelyn Martinez, 37, of Costa Mesa, about 11 a.m. at a Dynasty Suites Motel in the 1300 block of Firestone Boulevard in Santa Fe Springs. Mireles was arrested on suspicion of stabbing and killing Robert Liken, 43, of Long Beach, after the victim had spent the night with Martinez at a house in the 1100 block of Atlanta Way. Both men had a relationship with Martinez, according to police.

The director of a UC Irvine medical facility died of drowning after blunt-force trauma to her head, but the manner in which she died remains unknown, according to a county coroner's report. Dr. Marianne Cinat, 45, was found dead in her pool at her Rossmoor home in June. Cinat was a prominent Orange County surgeon and served as medical director for the UCI Regional Burn Center in Orange until her death. The coroner's report says there were abrasions to Cinat's forehead and nose, and hemorrhaging at the front and crown of her head.

Orange County investigators searched an Irvine business Friday in connection with the death of a Laguna Beach man, an official confirmed. The homicide division of the Orange County Sheriff's Department executed a search warrant as part of their investigation in the death of Christopher Ryan Smith. Authorities searched a business in the 18000 block of Sky Park Drive around 11:15 a.m. Friday, a sheriff's department official said Saturday. Smith, a 32-year-old Internet executive, was allegedly killed by his business partner, Edward Younghoon Shin, of Irvine, in their San Juan Capistrano office, the Los Angeles Times reported.