KHTS Radio Santa Clarita Radio – Santa Clarita News
Law enforcement officials seized more than 550 guns that belonged to an Agua Dulce man Thursday and Friday after determining the man was a convicted felon.
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The joint operation, conducted by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the California Department of Justice, took 432 guns from the home of 60-year-old Manuel Fernandez on June 14.
A second warrant, served to a location connected to Fernandez, found 30 more guns in an associate’s home. The female suspect was not home at the time of the warrant service and has not returned to the location. Detectives are preparing charges for the District Attorney for filing consideration.
And when investigators returned to Fernandez’s home Friday, they discovered another 91 firearms hidden in the home.
In total, investigators recovered 553 guns as part of the operation.
Fernandez was arrested on charges relating to the weapons and ammo found in his home. Convicted felons are prohibited from owning either guns or ammunition under federal law.
Detectives also seized computers, cell phones, and hard drives, believed to be involved in the illicit purchase of firearms by the suspect, from the residence.
Do you have a news tip? Call us at (661) 298-1220, or drop us a line at community@hometownstation.com.Due to the large number of firearms recovered, detectives enlisted the assistance of the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) for tracing the purchase origination of the weapons.
Agents from both the California Department of Justice and ATF will be providing resources as the case continues through the court process.
“This case is a testament to the community’s involvement in reducing crime and taking guns out of the hands of criminals,” Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell said. “The swift response of our Palmdale Sheriff’s Station personnel and the assistance provided by our partners at the California Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms showed the positive result of our campaign ‘See Something, Say Something.’ We are proud of the relationship we have built in the Antelope Valley area as we continue to build trust with the communities we serve.”
According to LASD officials, Fernandez bonded out from the jail ward of Los Angeles County Medical Center on June 15, the same day the second set of weapons were recovered from his home.
He is set to appear in Antelope Valley Superior Court on July 9.
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Even if this dude was not a convicted felon, this is a ridiculous amount of firearms for any one person to have in their possession. This is exactly how the “bad guys and bad gals” get their weapons. There should be nothing legal about having that number of weapons, regardless of if you support the 2nd amendment or not.
Great work from LASD on getting these off the street…nothing good was going to come from this situation!
Probably got them illegally. Trump should be working on gun control not separating kids from their parents.
Silly rabbit, gun control only works with law abiding citizens. Criminals, like the guy in the article, get guns anyway. Do liberals _really_ not see that? I’m sincerely curious how you think. I do agree that no one needs to own this many guns.
SCV Guy…don’t try to explain logic to a liberal…her head might explode! It’s a mental illness.
At least a Liberal can acknowledge we have a gun problem in America, instead of sticking their head in the sand in spite of what all “logic” tells us
No gun laws would have stopped this person or any other from collecting weapons. He was/is a convicted felon. There are already laws in place to stop him from owning, but as you can clearly see gun laws do not work. A criminal will always find a work-around. A total and complete elimination of weapons is impossible. There will always be a black market. Look how well prohibition worked out. And even if all weapons were taken from LAW ABIDING citizens (as criminals will never turn in their weapons) then we become positioned to become subjects. Learn from history; Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Mao Se dong all confiscated weapons then killed millions!!! As far as Trump separating kids from their parents at the border, do your research. The laws his admin are currently following were in place way before he got the WH and the Dems are so anti-Trump they will not come to the table on immigration. Hell, they won’t come to the table on ANYTHING! The president does not makes laws, congress does. His admin warned the offending countries. The WH clearly said we will enforce our laws. That’s the reason illegal immigration dropped 73% in 2017; The parents knew they would be separated from their children. Kids only get separated once the parents re-enter after getting caught the 2nd or subsequent times. At that point the crime is now a felony (first offense is a misdemeanor and they are held together and sent back within days) but as a felony charge the parents will have to go through due-process…. just like any other criminal. And just like any other criminal, kids are ALWAYS separated from their parents when they get sent to jail. Or do you think drug dealers, bank robbers and rapists get to take their children to jail? Enough with this kids-at-the-border distraction. This law has been on the books for years and NOW all of a sudden it’s a problem? What about when the previous admin had a chance to do something about it? What about the admin that passed the law? Hypocrites. And what about all the human trafficking going on? How does border patrol know these kids belong to the adults that brought them? What parent would want to risk their children’s lives? If Dems really CARED about these children and these people, they would put pressure on the 3rd world countries they come from and advocate for change. Let’s face reality; it’s an ignorant voter base and Dems are salivating. What good does it do to have an open border policy when the immigrants refuse to assimilate? Does that not dilute the host country? They have no desire to change their own countries for the better but have no problem with them changing ours? Maybe illegal immigration advocates should try to sneak into Mexico and see how well that goes?
And what law stops this? Obviously since he is a felon he has broken laws before, did it again by possessing firearms, and he avoided background checks in the “great” state of California, where you dems have all the gun control laws and still could not stop him. Laws, exsisting or new, do not, will not stop this type of individual.
The real problem is the non enforcement of laws already wriiten. When the written laws are not being enforced, chaos reigns because everybody does what they want without consequences like someone harming your family, and not putting them in jail because they have kids, and you are now in “had” a kid category. So you would allow a criminal to not be incarcerated because he has a child, after killing yours, rather than enforce the law? Single parents go to jail everyday, and guess what happens to their kids. They become wards of the state, and because they are citizens it is okay?
At 75 feet I place a three inch group with a nine millimeter, and my grandson, whose mother is from Mexico by the way, is very safe and secure at my house. Living in a rural area where it can take 30 minutes or more for law enforcement to get there taught me to protect myself, even though I live in an NFL city today.
This country is free today because of private gun ownership. Citizens defeated the British in 1776, and during WWII, you guys in California were not invaded by Japan simply because they knew that invading the mainland they would find a rifle behind every blade of grass. It forces a whole new tactic when “everybody” is a potential combatant, that is why the war on terrorism is taking so long. If WWII were happening today, I’m afraid the left coast would 1, be to wussified to fight, on one hand protest going to war and complaining about a lack of protection on the other. 2, with “open boarders” would welcome the invaders to a point they would only find resistance once they arrive at the Rocky mountains, when Montana, Texas, Oklahoma,Nebraska, and Kansas would start the fight to save the country.
What is needed in this country is control, CRIMINAL CONTROL, not gun control. I’ll control mine, both weapon and criminal, at my house. I take care of mine myself, that’s welfare, property protection, and security, don’t need or want the federal, state, or local governments doing it for me. I helped my son and daughter-in-law with immigration to the tune of over $5k, and yeah, I want a wall, because why should she have to wait for citizenship and the ones who broke the law get it more quickly for free, I know we won’t get a refund.
You hear the news call Trump a tyrant, yet your leaders, Pelosi & Schumer, want him to “dictate” the law with executive orders, rather than just enforce the law as constitutionally required. Pelosi & Schumer, are constitutionally required to write the laws, not Trump, yet Schumer offers Trump his pen. These elected leaders are not doing their job and they need to be removed from their positions but there are too many constitutional illiterates out the to do it, a failure, or progressive victory as it may be, in the educational system. In truth, if really are open about it, the Democrat Party has enough ‘super delegates” to control itself, ignoring the people. Kind of like the communist party nominating its leader, then in a show election, we’ll call it a primary here, only the communist party gets to vote. Who wins? Ask Putin and Hillary, Sanders got shafted. Why tax the rich at 80-90% and redistribution of wealth? To control the poor. They, the Democrat form of government, would take the money from the wealthy, end their ability to hire a worker. Then give that unhired worker minimal shelter and food, they did that too during slavery by the way, and all you have to do is vote for them. If you don’t, if you want more than just to survive, you are wrong. No, I just refuse to be their slave, doing only what they tell me to do, thinking only the way they wish me to think.
All the gun control and “kids in cages” stuff is a deflection from the IG report. Where Obama and his version of the KGB, ignored his administration using illegal servers all the while he locked up kids himself. But hey, ain’t no scandals in his administration, and the press just helps him lie to his slaves, most of the time just through omission of his wrongdoing.
Isn’t AV a great place to raise a family. The place is crawling with dirt bags like this guy.
The VAST majority of these guns are WW I and WW II bolt action rifles. Even the black cylinder shaped items in the foreground are “uppers”, simply the top half of a gun and are not legally firearms and don’t even have a serial number.