Mayra Cruz, 27, was found shot in the head and left lifeless in her boyfriend’s basement apartment at this home on Reservoir Avenue in Pawtucket. The boyfriend, Juan Diaz, the suspect in her slaying, was arrested in Albany, N.Y., yesterday.

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The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

In the last two hours of Wednesday, two 17-year-old boys and a young woman were killed in shootings in Pawtucket, Providence and Woonsocket.

In Pawtucket, Mayra Cruz, 27, of Galego Court, had been shot in the head and left lifeless in her boyfriend’s basement apartment –– the boyfriend had called 911 and fled before the police arrived.

In Providence, Virgilio Rojo, 17, of 470 Manton Ave., was gunned down on Eastwood Avenue in the Hartford neighborhood, as his friend ran for cover.

And in Woonsocket, 17-year-old Brandon Smith was found sprawled at the doorstep of a house at 45 Robinson St. where he’d been living for the last few months.

By nightfall yesterday, one of the suspects in the shootings was in custody. Pawtucket police said that 24-year-old Juan L. Diaz had been arrested in Albany, N.Y., for the slaying of his girlfriend, Cruz. The police had tracked him there after he used his cell phone to call his other girlfriend, a woman in Prospect Heights, according to a Pawtucket city official who’d been briefed on the investigation.

The deadly evening on Wednesday had begun at Diaz’s apartment at 14 Reservoir Ave., at quarter to 10, when the Pawtucket police got a call from the suspect himself.

Caller tells Pawtucket police he accidentally shot his girlfriend

The caller, later identified as Diaz, contacted the police from the Reservoir Avenue apartment and said he’d accidentally shot his girlfriend in the face, according to the police dispatch log. He said the shooting happened at 3 a.m. and “he stated that she had the gun and when he was retrieving it … it accidentally fired, shooting her in the face,” according to the log entry.

“He stated that he tended to her injuries throughout the night and at one point she was throwing up blood and she has now stopped breathing,” the dispatcher wrote.

The police swarmed the scene, holding back the waiting ambulance and firefighters from going inside, until the police Special Response Team could sweep through the darkened two-story house.

Neighbors on the quiet and well-kept street were warned to stay indoors with the lights off, and the police also shut off the lights of the cruisers, out of concern that a gunman was still in the house, watching them. The owner of the house, Jacinta Fernandes, waited on an adjacent street, nearly in tears. Diaz is a tenant in the in-law apartment in her basement, where she’d allowed him to live rent-free since March.

She works at a gas station in Providence, drives her 14-year-old son to school, and attends his baseball games, so she had little contact with Diaz, whom she knew as “Johnny.” “He was nice. Nice guy,” Fernandes said yesterday. “When I’m coming in, he’d be sitting on the steps and say, ‘Hi.’ And I’m like, ‘Hi.’ Then he’d say to my son [a baseball player], ‘I hope you guys win the game.’ ”

She was at a baseball game with her son that night when a neighbor called and told her to come home quickly –– the police were surrounding her house.

The police found no one inside, except for the dead woman. Fernandes said she didn’t know Cruz, although she said the young woman visited every day, mostly at night.

Cruz’s red Saturn had been towed from outside the house sometime on Wednesday before her body was discovered. A woman from the neighborhood had noticed the passenger-side window had been smashed, an unusual sight on this close-knit street, and she called the police.

Pawtucket police Sgt. Corey Jackson said yesterday Cruz’s car had been seized by the police and was part of the investigation.

As the Pawtucket police were responding to a homicide in their city, the Woonsocket police were getting calls about a gunshot on Robinson Street.

Friend says Woonsocket victim had started hanging around with "the wrong people."

The police found Brandon Smith fatally shot in the chest, fallen at the foot of a door on the side of a two-story house at 45 Robinson St. He was pronounced dead at Landmark Medical Center.

Yesterday, detectives canvassed the neighborhood and talked to people who knew the boy. Police Chief Eric Croce said little about the case, declining to release initial police reports, saying he didn’t want to jeopardize the investigation.

“We’re continuing to try to piece together a timeline of things that happened prior to the incident,” he said.

As police investigated at the crime scene, teenagers were spreading the word about the shooting over the Internet. Sixteen-year-old Alyssa Bailey, who said she’s known Brandon since the third grade, and her friend, Melanie Ascencio, left a bouquet of daisies and carnations at the house where Smith died.

Bailey said she’d remained friends with Smith through their school years, and even after he stopped attending BEACON Charter School recently. “He was a well-liked person,” Bailey said. “He never had trouble with people. I don’t understand why this happened to him.”

Still, she said Brandon had started “hanging out with the wrong people,” young men who behaved poorly and got in trouble with the law.

Jason Horne, who lives on the first floor, said the same.

Smith had moved into a woman’s apartment on the second-floor about six months ago, Horne said, because his father, Bruce Smith, had asked the boy to help her keep up the apartment as she battled cancer.

The woman was too upset to say much when she was approached by a reporter. “He was loved,” was all she’d say.

In Providence, Virgilio Rojo's death continues a surge of gun violence

Minutes before midnight in Providence, another teenager, Virgilio Rojo, was walking with a friend on Eastwood Avenue when gunshots were fired.

Rojo and his 18-year-old companion ran, but one round had struck Rojo in the torso, said Providence police Maj. Stephen M. Campbell, who oversees the detective division. Rojo collapsed in the middle of Eastwood Avenue, between Plainfield Street and Hartford Avenue, as his friend escaped unscathed. Rojo was later pronounced dead at Rhode Island Hospital.

Campbell said that the friend, who he would not identify, has spoken to detectives. The police do not know whether there was more than one gunman, or if the shooters were on foot or in a car.

The police said that Rojo lived with his family at Manton Heights, a subsidized housing development in the city’s Olneyville neighborhood. The police said that Rojo and his friend had past run-ins with the law. Rojo had spent time at the state Training School, and for a while, he was released from the juvenile correctional facility and placed on home confinement.

Teny Gross, executive director of the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence, responded to the hospital with several street workers. He knew Rojo and was aware of his troubles on the street. He was saddened that violence had stolen the life of another youth.

“It’s still painful to see,” he said. “To me, they are all children. It’s a big loss to his friends and family.”

Rojo was the city’s seventh homicide this year, and the sixth person to be shot to death. Overall, Providence has seen a surge in gun violence this year, with 31 shootings since Jan. 1, compared with 18 during the same time period last year. At this time last year, there’d been three homicides; two involved guns.

Late yesterday, about 30 detectives and patrol officers met at the Providence station to share information about Rojo and the shooting. They decided to flood Manton Heights and Hartford Park, another subsidized housing project, with officers to gather more information and head off any more potential violence.

“If you’re carrying a gun in that area,” said Campbell, “you’re carrying it at your own risk.”

—With staff reports from Amanda Milkovits.

bmalinow@projo.com