Ceres, Calif. ? A Marine who killed one town police officer and wounded another one was a gang member who was high on cocaine, not a combat veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress, police said.

Investigators said they are discounting a theory that Lance Cpl. Andres Raya, 19, may have instigated a “suicide by cop” — provoking officers to shoot him — because he did not want to return to Iraq.

“During our investigation, we found he wasn’t due to go back to Iraq, never faced combat situations and never even fired his gun,” Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Woodman said.

Raya shot the two officers with a rifle outside a liquor store on Jan. 9 before police returned fire and killed him.

Raya’s family and friends denied he was involved with a gang and said he was changed by the seven months he spent in Iraq before returning in September to Camp Pendleton near San Diego.

They said Raya became withdrawn and unable to hold a conversation, and that he told them gruesome stories of house-to-house combat and of watching Marines commit suicide. They said he questioned the war and said he did not want to go back.

But Woodman said investigators found that Raya’s transport unit never saw combat and that he was recently transferred to a unit scheduled to be deployed to Okinawa.

The investigation also uncovered ties to the Norteno gang, Woodman said, including a safe in Raya’s room containing a book by a member of the prison gang Nuestra Familia, photos of Raya wearing the gang’s signature color red and making gang signs with his hands, and a shopping list for black clothing, body armor, assault rifles and ammunition.

An uncle, Nicholas Cortez of Modesto, defended his nephew, saying “stress from the service” is the only explanation for Raya’s actions.

“The military trained him to kill,” Cortez said.