SR man killed defending cousin, father says

<p>Matthew Allen Toste attended his new employer's Christmas party Saturday night before heading with friends to continue the night of celebration at a downtown Santa Rosa nightclub.</p><p>But the 32-year-old Santa Rosa man never made it there, being shot dead early Sunday in a confrontation with five gang members in a parking garage on Seventh Street, police said. Toste may be Sonoma County's fourth gang-related homicide victim of the year and the first in downtown Santa Rosa.</p><p>"It could happen to anybody," the victim's father, Bob Toste of Roseville, said Monday. "This was not an aggressive young man who's out looking for a fight."</p><p>Police on Monday continued to investigate the shooting that left Toste dead and two suspects wounded.</p><p>Two of the five suspects, Paul Whiterock, 26, and Joseph Lopez Jr., 18, both of Santa Rosa, were arrested Sunday and were expected to appear in court this morning for possible arraignment on homicide charges. They are being held without bail in the Sonoma County Jail.</p><p>Investigators said they were sifting through witness accounts and other evidence and declined to make public some details of the shooting and to identify the wounded suspects, saying they needed to protect their case.</p><p>Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Lisa Banayat said investigators had not identified who shot Toste. She said the semi-automatic gun had not been recovered.</p><p>Toste, his date, a female cousin and her husband were walking through the parking garage to the Seven Ultra Lounge across Seventh Street when at least five men surrounded the women and began making sexually provocative comments, said Bob Toste and a witness who asked not to be named.</p><p>The suspects apparently were in the garage waiting for friends at the bar.</p><p>"It was a verbal argument that turned into a fistfight and there were shots," Banayat said.</p><p>Bob Toste, who relayed witness accounts, said his son died defending his cousin, whom one of the men had grabbed in the buttocks.</p><p>When Matthew Toste insisted, "She's a married woman. ... That's enough," one man pushed his cousin aside, lunged at Toste but was knocked unconscious by Toste with a punch to the face, Bob Toste said.</p><p>"Moments later, gunshots rang out," he said.</p><p>Toste died at the scene. Of the two wounded suspects, one was treated and released from a Santa Rosa hospital and the second underwent surgery for a leg wound Sunday and remained hospitalized Monday morning, police said.</p><p>Toste was a single father raising a 5-year-old son in Santa Rosa and sharing custody with his former wife, who lives in Alaska, his father said.</p><p>Employed since April by Granite Construction Co., Toste had worked as a journeyman laborer building retaining walls to repair landslides on Highways 1 and 116, a company manager said.</p><p>"He was happy to be working for Granite, a very personable young man," said Pat Traverso, Granite Construction's area manager in Healdsburg, who visited with Toste during Saturday's company party at the Hyatt Vineyard Creek in Railroad Square. "It was a shock that something like that would happen."</p><p>An autopsy was scheduled for Toste today, Sonoma County Coroner's Sgt. Mitch Mana said.</p><p>It will be weeks before toxicology test results reveal whether Toste's judgment may have been impaired when he took on the gang members inside the garage, investigators said.</p><p>Whiterock and Lopez are both norteño gang members, said a law enforcement source, who asked not to be named. Both have criminal records.</p><p>Lopez in 2003 was sentenced to three years in the California Youth Authority for an assault and battery conviction, the law enforcement source said.</p><p>Before then, Lopez went to Slater Middle School, near where he was arrested Sunday in his parents' Jacky Way duplex apartment, said John Lawson, an uncle.</p><p>"It's a sorry, sorry thing," Lawson said about the arrests of his nephew and Whiterock, whom he also knows.</p><p>Lawson spoke Monday evening in the Moorland neighborhood at Santa Rosa's south edge, on a street where on New Year's Eve 2004 a 16-year-old boy was shot dead in a gang-related attack.</p><p>Lawson said he used to affiliate with norteños and he questioned characterizations of Lopez and Whiterock as gang members.</p><p>"Whiterock don't hang with nobody but Native Americans," Lawson said. "He's a mellow cat, he's mostly a homebody."</p><p>As for his nephew, who like Whiterock is an American Indian, Lawson said, "That's just got to be something he got out of sixth grade, getting labeled."</p><p>Lopez "hasn't shown me anything like that - I'd be able to tell," he said.</p><p>He described his nephew as "basically, a follower" and said he thought that since being released from the youth authority Lopez had, like his father, been working in landscaping.</p><p>Court records show Whiterock's criminal history dates at least to 1998, when he was convicted of misdemeanor assault. In several cases, charges were dismissed.</p><p>In February, a charge of forcible rape was dismissed, the court records show. A driving misdemeanor Whiterock was charged with was dismissed in 2005 and a felony assault charge was dismissed in 2004.</p><p>In 1999, Whiterock and another man were arrested on suspicion of a gang-related assault and carjacking on Yulupa Avenue. He was convicted in 2000 of felony motor vehicle theft and sentenced to four years probation. The court record shows his probation was "terminated unsuccessfully" in 2003.</p><p>No one answered the door Monday at the mobile home in the Valle Vista III mobile home park on West Third Street where Whiterock lives.</p><p>Plans for an out-of-town funeral for Toste are pending, his father said. The family is seeking to arrange a trust fund to benefit the child, he said.</p>