The City Attorney’s Office is suing a Highland Park brother and sister, alleging their home located near a high school has been the site of drug transactions and other crimes and should be declared a nuisance.
The Los Angeles Superior Court complaint brought Wednesday against Ruben Montoya Perez, 64, and his 63-year-old sister, Guadalupe, asks that the alleged problems at the home in the 5200 block of Buchanan Street be abated.
“The property is a flashpoint for violence where multiple stabbings have occurred over the years, ” the suit alleges. “In addition to this violence, the property is also a place where individuals regularly go to use narcotics.”
A representative for the defendants could not be immediately reached for comment.
The residence is about 335 feet from Franklin High School, according to the suit, which says Los Angeles police have made multiple arrests and investigated numerous crimes at the home since June 2014, including an attempted murder, assaults with deadly weapons, gang members and felons in possession of firearms, grand theft, vehicle thefts and possession of methamphetamine.
Members of two criminal street gangs and their associates congregate daily in front of and in the back yard of the residence, where they engage in possessing narcotics, drinking alcohol in public, harassing and intimidating passersby and in possessing illegal firearms, according to the suit.
The home is also used by gang members to evade and hide from law enforcement, including one who recently was loitering in front of the home when police drove up, prompting him to run through the front and side yards holding his waistband, the suit alleges. The suspect was located hiding in a home next door and officers recovered a loaded blue-steel semi-automatic firearm he had discarded, according to the complaint.
In December 2014, a woman went to the home looking for her boyfriend, the father of her young child, and as the couple were walking to her vehicle, a woman rushed out of the property with a knife and stabbed the victim in the face, slashing the bottom of her lip to her throat, the suit states.
After a meeting between the Perez siblings and a lawyer from the City Attorney’s Office, crime at the home initially decreased, but gang members continued to loiter, and in January, someone shot and wounded Ruben Perez there, the suit states.