More Video and Details Released in Fatal Melody Market Shooting
Sheriff’s Office Shares Full Incident Video and Name of Off-Duty Officer Who Shot Armed 19-Year-Old in Orcutt
The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday shared new surveillance footage and details in the fatal shooting of a young man outside the Melody Market in Orcutt on March 25, including the name of the off-duty police officer who shot and killed the suspect.
Manuel Reyes Rios, 19, of Santa Maria, was shot by off-duty Santa Maria police officer Antonio Peña, the Sheriff’s Office revealed in a May 17 press release. The newly released, roughly nine-minute video captured on the market’s exterior cameras shows the shooting and the moments directly leading up to and following it from two different angles.
The video begins just before 8 p.m., when a white sedan carrying four occupants arrives just before Rios and three others pull up in a silver sedan. Officer Peña, a three-year veteran of the department, arrives shortly after in a black pickup truck with his family and enters the store alone, followed by a fourth vehicle, a white SUV, with an unidentified woman and her two children. As the woman enters the market, leaving her two children in the car, she holds the door open for Rios, seen wearing a red hoodie in the video, as he exits.
