By allowing ads to appear on this site, you support the local businesses who, in turn, support great journalism.
Drive-by shooting on quiet Pine Street
DriveBYDSC 0365
Manteca Police canine officer Grant Flory talks with one resident targeted in a shotgun blast in 700 block of Pine Street Friday afternoon. A pellet pattern eight to 10 inches in diameter left proof of the shooting in a plaster wall near the bottom left of the windows on the porch. - photo by GLENN KAHL
A suspected gang-related drive-by shooting rocked the normally quiet 700 block of Pine Street at about 2:45 p.m. on Friday.

Two men in their early 20s were walking to their homes on the sidewalk when two 18 to 20-year-old Hispanic men reportedly drove in an angle toward them on the sidewalk with the passenger leaning out of the window of a 90s Honda Civic and fired the first of two shotgun blasts at them.

Police said pellets hit the upper ear of the 21-year-old, ending with a pattern of buckshot hitting a post on a porch of one house on the south side of Pine Street and continuing to the side wall of an adjacent home.  

The second man – a 20-year-old – reportedly ran in front of the shooter’s car toward his house on the north side of the street. He was running for cover behind a pickup truck parked in the driveway.  A second shotgun blast narrowly missed him and buckshot embedded in the wall near a front window on the porch of the house leaving a pattern of pellets and breaking out a window pane, officers said.

The car quickly made a u-turn, witnesses said, and sped back eastward across Sheridan Avenue as the victim ran toward his home in the 200 block of Fremont Street.  

Two police officers, Grant Flory and Shawn Cavin, were out of their cars on Powers Avenue, completing another assignment, when they both reported hearing gunshots.  They quickly responded in their patrol cars to search out the source of the gunfire.  

Cavin was approaching the intersection of Sheridan and Fremont as the Honda blurred in front of him at a high rate of speed.  He gave chase but lost the suspect when a citizen pointed that the car had turned left, soon finding that it hadn’t.  Flory found the victim with an injury to his ear in front of his Fremont Street home where medics were called to treat him.

The two men, who were targeted in the shooting, told officers the car first followed them on Sheridan Avenue as they walked toward the 7-Eleven at Yosemite and Powers avenues where they were going to buy some drinks.  As they returned home it passed them up again with the occupants taunting them.

Several neighbors near the shooting witnessed the event and gave the police descriptions and filled them in on the scenario confirming how the shooting took place.  They said the shooter was wearing an Oakland Athletics jacket and had the beginnings of a goatee.

Pine Street was blocked off for about an hour as officers searched the area for evidence relating to the shooting.