What crime happened yesterday at the Ocean View Hotel?
Ronald Noles was the kind of manager who cared about who stayed at his inn in Ocean View. If they caused problems, they were out. But if they were polite, he would let them stay longer than the posted 30-day limit, residents said. On Friday, they were shocked after Noles reportedly was shot and killed in the lobby of the Bay Inn, at 315 E. Ocean View Ave. “It’s just indescribable. It’s just unbelievable,” said Kirk Turner, who was staying at the inn with his wife because it is close to his job and they are looking for a permanent residence. “It’s just a terrible thing.” Shots were reported at the inn, also known as the Relax Inn, at 1:35 p.m., police said. Officers found a man dead in the lobby at 1:42. No arrests had been made as of Friday night. Police have not identified Noles as the victim, but inn residents and a friend said he was the one killed. Some were at the inn when the shooting happened; others came home and heard the bad news. Noles, they said, was so good to them that on
Nick Lamastra never heard gunshots, but he heard a woman crying afterwards. “She was frantic,” said Lamastra. “She couldn’t even talk. She was just breathing heavily.” Lamastra was working near Ocean View’s Bay Inn Hotel, clearing branches and trees away from a nearby restaurant, when a woman came running up to him from the motel office, panicking. “I said, ‘Have you been shot’ and I tried to look at her shirt and she hadn’t,” remembered Lamastra. “And she said, ‘No, he shot my husband.'” Police say a man inside the Bay Inn Hotel was shot just after 1:30 p.m. Within minutes he was pronounced dead. Guests at the hotel say he was not just the owner and manager, they say he was like a father to everyone who stayed there. “I walked up the other day with my mother-in-law and she had her hair done and he started singing her a pretty lady song,” smiled Kristy Mack. Mack has been at the hotel for a month and considered the owner and his wife among her friends. She says she saw him ten minutes
