Surveillance video shows the bizarre confrontation as two victims fight off a woman with a knife before police open fire on the suspected carjacker in Santa Ana Tuesday.
Witnesses said the wild interaction began at Newhope and 5th streets when a woman in her 20s grabbed a water jug, acted as if it were a canteen of gasoline, and began dumping it over cars in a parking lot.
"She was going after pretty much everybody. She was going nuts," Jose Reynoso, a manager at El Mercado La Rancherita, said.
People began running into the market to get away from the woman, later identified as 27-year-old Alma Ramirez, surveillance video from El Mercado La Rancherita showed.
But as people began running inside, they realized they couldn't lock the door.
Seconds later, the video shows a couple struggling to keep the woman with a large kitchen knife out.
They held the door shut tight, but the woman managed to pull it open and lunge toward the couple, the surveillance footage showed.
The couple, Lorenzo Folch and his wife, was closing up shop at their hair salon when the woman lunged at them with the knife, Folch said.
Folch said the woman grabbed his keys and tried to steal his car before the bizarre confrontation, and he and his wife ran to the market.
Folch suffered a cut from the knife amid the struggle to shut the market's door.
At some point, two other men tried to intervene and were cut as well.
After Ramirez fled on a bike, Santa Ana police officers responded to the 3300 block of West 5th Street.
Snapchat video captured a Santa Ana police officer opening fire on Ramirez as she fled with the knife.
She was taken to the hospital and had surgery. Ramirez was arrested on suspicion of carjacking and assault with a deadly weapon.
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Police records revealed Ramirez was arrested the week before on suspicion of public intoxication.
No officers were injured.
