A police dragnet for two men suspected of shooting to death a Silver Spring store clerk before carjacking a Comcast van focused on the Latino community straddling the border between Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.
Police in both counties Wednesday passed out fliers and conducting interviews with witnesses near where the van was left at 12th Avenue and Ruatan Street. They were also targeting the 7-Eleven parking lot at University Boulevard East and Piney Branch Road where the two gun-wielding men stole the van and where dozens of Hispanic day laborers gather.
The two men shot Jorge Villatoro, 53, to death in Variedades Jenny, the store his daughter bought for him when he moved to the U.S. from El Salvador, police said. They left behind an anxious neighborhood where tensions were rising between store owners and a mushrooming crowd of workers that gathers nearby.
“The neighborhood has gone downhill since the police left the 7-Eleven parking lot,” said Phi Nguyan, who has owned a fabric shop above Villatoro’s store for 17 years. “Now there’s more people around the 7-Eleven. It makes me very scared.”
In 2006, Montgomery County police shut down a police substation operating in the parking lot because it was falling apart, a police spokeswoman said. Since then the day laborer crowd has ballooned, residents and store owners said.
Police believe the two men made the quick 100-foot dash to the 7-Eleven and stole the van; the first call for the shooting was at 4:10 p.m., and the call for the carjacking was at 4:15 p.m.
Cathy Nguyan, who owns a tattoo parlor in the same tiny strip mall where Villatoro was shot, said she was one of the first to find Villatoro’s body behind a counter. His father was at the front door and clearly shaken when she ran in to see what had happened after realizing shots had been fired, she said.
“I was so nervous I didn’t take my son to school this morning and I didn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Jorge on the floor.”
