After her friend Jose Luis Lopez texted her about an intruder in his Pine Castle home, Loida Zunun anxiously called 911 for help. Minutes later, Lopez was dead, the victim of Orange County deputies who arrived to see two men fighting and mistakenly thought one of them had a knife.
“I called them thinking that they were going to come help us, that was the whole idea,” Zunun said through tears at a Sunday vigil for Lopez, where his friends grieved the 26-year-old Mexican immigrant’s passing. They remembered him as a brilliant soccer player and hard worker who was determined to make a life for himself and his family back home.
The Feb. 8 incident and its aftermath come at a time of heightened tensions between local Latinos and government authorities, over issues ranging from how immigration laws are enforced to how their communities are policed. For some who attended the vigil, Lopez’s death fed both those narratives, reinforcing their distrust…