18-year-old arrested for allegedly shooting Indio man to death
An 18-year-old Indio man is in custody for allegedly shooting a man May 27 who died later that day in a hospital.
Steven Lopez was arrested on suspicion of murder and booked into the Riverside County jail in Indio, where he was being held on $1 million bail. Lopez is accused in the shooting death of 22-year-old Jose Osuna Arriaga, of Indio.
Osuna Arriaga showed up at Indio’s John F. Kennedy Hospital just after midnight Friday with gunshot wounds, according to Indio police Sgt. Dan Marshall. His appearance at the hospital came after Indio police received multiple reports of gunshots in the 47500 block of Calle Zafiro.
Because of the severity of Osuna Arriaga’s injuries, he was airlifted to Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, where he died at 10:47 a.m., according to the county coroner’s office.
The subsequent investigation led police to Lopez as the sole suspect in the homicide. Lopez was arrested Tuesday at about 2 p.m., when Indio police found him driving a car on Jefferson Street, near Fred Waring Drive.
Lopez was arrested without incident. A man and a woman also in the car were questioned and released, and are not considered suspects, Marshall said.
Lopez was charged Wednesday with murder, as well as a sentence-enhancing allegation of discharging a firearm causing great bodily injury. He pleaded not guilty during a Thursday arraignment and will return to the Indio courthouse June 13 for a felony settlement conference.
