A drive-by shooting on a residential Santa Ana street this week ended with a foot chase, a discarded gun, and the discovery of two small children riding in the suspect vehicle. Three people now face felony charges, including child endangerment, after police say a gunman opened fire on a pedestrian from a moving car before speeding away.
According to the Santa Ana Police Department, officers responded to the area of 120 S. Birch St. after a report of shots fired and found several expended cartridge cases scattered in the street. A witness told officers that a suspect had shot at a pedestrian from a vehicle before fleeing the scene. The intended victim was not hurt, police said.
An officer located the suspect vehicle about 20 minutes later, setting off a chaotic scene. The front passenger jumped out and ran, triggering a foot pursuit before officers took him into custody. He had discarded a firearm during the chase, which officers recovered, per the department's account.
Two Children Found Inside the Getaway Car
The remaining occupants of the vehicle were detained, and among them were two small children who police believe were inside the car at the time of the shooting. The children were unharmed and were released to a responsible family member, the department said. In total, three subjects were arrested on various felony charges, including child endangerment.
The location sits within Santa Ana's historic Lacy neighborhood, a dense, largely rental urban area adjacent to downtown Santa Ana where roughly 86 percent of residents rent their homes, according to the City of Santa Ana. The neighborhood is a mix of single-family homes, apartment buildings, and commercial corridors just steps from downtown.
Felony Exposure Under California's Drive-By Shooting Law
California Penal Code § 26100(c) makes willfully and maliciously discharging a firearm from a vehicle at another person a felony punishable by three, five, or seven years in state prison, regardless of whether the target is actually hit, according to the Shouse Law Group. The same statute's subsections (a) and (b) also allow prosecutors to charge a vehicle's driver or owner who knowingly permits a passenger to bring a gun into or fire it from the car, meaning multiple occupants can face felony liability even if only one person pulls the trigger, per FindLaw's summary of the code.
The child endangerment charges stem from a separate statute, Penal Code § 273a, which applies when someone willfully allows a child to be placed in a situation risking great bodily harm or death and carries a potential sentence of two, four, or six years in state prison. Notably, that law does not require an actual injury to a child — exposure to active gunfire is enough to trigger the charge, per the same legal summary.
Part of a Broader Firearm Problem
The seized firearm from this case was recovered under standard evidence procedures; under California law and Orange County protocol, guns taken by police must be held for at least 48 hours and can only be released after a Law Enforcement Gun Release clearance from the state Department of Justice, according to the Orange County Sheriff's Department. This shooting was logged in the department's weekly firearm seizure report covering August 1 through August 7.
Santa Ana has struggled with a persistent volume of illegal firearms for years. A California Department of Justice analysis released in July 2024 found that law enforcement recovered roughly 4,000 crime guns in the city between 2010 and 2022 — about 12.77 crime guns per 1,000 residents. Separately, an analysis of police data by the Manshoory Law Group found aggravated assaults in Santa Ana surged 36 percent in 2023 even as total homicides dropped 77 percent over the same period.
The department's own numbers show the scale of the challenge its officers face citywide. Santa Ana police logged 435,749 total calls for service in 2025 alone, and the department's Special Investigations Division seized 72 firearms and made 395 arrests connected to crimes against persons that year, according to the city's 2025 Year-End Update. It remains unclear whether the firearm recovered in this week's foot pursuit is linked to other open cases through ballistic testing, and the identities of the three arrested subjects have not been released.
The incident echoes other recent gun violence cases across Orange County. Hoodline previously reported on a Tustin gunman sentenced to 13 years for a separate drive-by shooting, part of a wider pattern of vehicle-based gun violence and multi-agency arrests seen elsewhere in the county this year.
