Man in a Santa Suit Kills at Least 8 at a Party
COVINA, Calif. — A man in a Santa Claus outfit opened fire on a Christmas Eve gathering of his in-laws in this Los Angeles suburb and then methodically set their house ablaze, killing at least eight people and injuring several others, the authorities said Thursday.
Bruce Pardo, identified as the gunman.
The attack occurred during a Christmas Eve gathering.
Shortly after the attack, the gunman, identified as Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, 45, killed himself with a single shot to the head at the home of his brother in the Sylmar section of Los Angeles, the police said.
In addition to the eight people whose bodies were found in the ashes of the house here, none of whom were identified, at least one other person was thought to be missing, and perhaps as many as three. Among the total of dead or missing were the couple who owned the home and their daughter, the estranged wife of the gunman, the police said.
Investigators continued to search the charred structure Thursday, and coroners said dental records would be needed to identify some of the remains.
The frenzied shooting occurred just before midnight Wednesday at the two-story house, set on a cul-de-sac in this middle-class town about 22 miles east of Los Angeles. Lt. Pat Buchanan of the Covina Police Department said Mr. Pardo, armed with one or two handguns and fire accelerant, had gone to the house looking for his former wife, Sylvia, with whom he was finalizing a contentious divorce after only a year of marriage.
People who escaped the house got out by smashing through glass and jumping. One woman broke an ankle when she leapt from a second-floor window.
The house was owned by James and Alicia Ortega, an elderly couple who were retired from their spray-painting business and who often invited their large extended family over for parties, particularly around Christmas.
Relatives said about 25 people, among them many children, were inside the home celebrating when Mr. Pardo knocked on the door around 11:30 p.m. He had apparently disguised himself as a hired entertainer for the children in order to gain access.
When a guest opened the door, Lieutenant Buchanan said, Mr. Pardo stepped inside the house, drew a semiautomatic handgun and immediately started shooting, beginning with an 8-year-old girl who was hit in the face but who survived, as did an older girl who was shot in the back.
As Mr. Pardo unleashed a barrage of gunfire in the living room, relatives smashed through windows, hid behind furniture or bounded upstairs. Then he sprayed the room with accelerant, using a device made of two pressurized tanks, one of which held pressurized gas. Within seconds, the house was ablaze.
Joshua Chavez of Seattle was visiting his mother’s house, which sits behind the Ortegas’, when he heard a loud explosion. “Then I saw black smoke and this large flame,” he said.
Mr. Chavez ran out to the backyard and heard three girls, including the one who had been shot in the back, trying to climb over his mother’s wall. “There’s some guy shooting in there,” he said one of the girls told him.
“About 20 seconds after that,” he continued, “the house was totally on fire. One girl said that a guy dressed as Santa started shooting.”
Another neighbor, Jeannie Goltz, 51, saw three more partygoers fleeing the burning home. One of them, a young woman, had escaped upstairs from the living room but broke her ankle when she jumped out a second-story window.
SWAT teams arrived shortly after Ms. Goltz had shepherded these three survivors into another neighbor’s house, but by that time Mr. Pardo was on his way back to Los Angeles.
Police officers said they could not recall so horrific a crime in Covina, and neighbors said they would never have imagined anything so grisly on their quiet block.
The Ortegas had lived in the house for more than two decades and were known for their family spirit, their generosity and their dog, which frequently escaped their yard.
“I would generally play Santa for the family every year,” said Pat Bower, a neighbor of the Ortegas for 25 years. “The family was always together. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles were always in the house. They were a gigantic family. We all envied them, actually.”
Robert and Gloria Magcalas lived next door to the Ortegas for 11 years but were celebrating Christmas Eve with relatives in Los Angeles. Their own home was barely spared the flames.
“They were a big, loving family,” Mrs. Magcalas said. “We usually exchanged gifts with them today. They gave us tamales and cookies every Christmas.”
The police said they had found two handguns in the ruins, and an additional two pistols at the scene of Mr. Pardo’s apparent suicide. Officials said they would continue to search the crime scene Friday, seeking information about the identities of the dead.
Solomon Moore reported from Covina, and Anahad O’Connor from New York.Attacker at Party Had Escape Plan, Police Say
COVINA, Calif. — Bruce Pardo had intended to fly to Canada on Christmas morning, hours after shooting his ex-wife, her parents and others at a holiday party here, setting their house on fire and leaving a car nearby, rigged to explode, police officials said Friday.
But despite his careful plans, Mr. Pardo was still in the home when it caught fire, the police said. Instead of fleeing the country, Mr. Pardo, who suffered third-degree burns on his arms and hands, drove 40 miles to his brother’s home in the Sylmar area of Los Angeles and shot himself in the head.
When his brother, Brad Pardo, found him Thursday night, Chief Kim Raney of the Covina police said, Mr. Pardo had $17,000 in cash and a plane ticket strapped to his body with cellophane. Pieces of the Santa Claus suit he had worn on his killing spree were fused to his legs and boots.
“This was a preplanned event,” Chief Raney said. “But he didn’t plan to ignite himself so that he couldn’t leave. His plans changed based on his injuries.”
On Friday, 9 of the 25 guests at the Christmas Eve party remained missing, Chief Raney said. Nine charred bodies had been pulled from the two-story house, he said, but Los Angeles County coroners were waiting for medical and dental records before identifying the remains.
Those missing ranged from 17 to 80 years old, Chief Raney said, and included Mr. Pardo’s ex-wife, Sylvia Pardo; her parents, Joseph and Alicia Ortega; and other friends and relatives who attended the annual holiday party.
Two girls, 8 and 16, remained in critical condition after being shot, and a 20-year-old woman who broke her ankle jumping from a window to escape was in satisfactory condition.
The 8-year-old girl was shot in the jaw when she ran toward the door where Mr. Pardo stood, “excited because she thought Santa had arrived,” Chief Raney said.
“It was chaos,” he said. “People were running for their lives.”
Most of the bodies recovered Thursday and Friday were found in the living room, said Lt. Tim Doonan of the Covina police. But some victims may have been upstairs when the second floor collapsed in flames, Lieutenant Doonan said.
The police said the four handguns Mr. Pardo used in the killings, a fifth one that he used to shoot himself and two shotguns found in his home in Montrose, Calif., were legally registered to him. He had also legally gotten the fuel tanks he used to seed the Covina fire.
On a job résumé the police recovered at his home, Mr. Pardo listed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering, jobs at various “medical centers and software manufacturers,” Chief Raney said, and a job as an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1985 to 1994.
“This guy was smart,” Chief Raney said, “but the device did explode. Obviously, with the burns he suffered, he didn’t anticipate that.”
Mr. Pardo was fired in October from a job as an engineer at “a company that makes foreign government radar systems,” Chief Raney said. He would not identify that company or another company he said had dismissed Mr. Pardo a few months earlier, in July.
A spokesman for ITT, Andy Hilton, said that Mr. Pardo worked as a software engineer from February 2005 until last July, when he was fired. Mr. Hilton would not give a reason for the job termination but said it was not related to any violent behavior or mental illness on Mr. Pardo’s part.
A pay stub from the Lockheed Federal Credit Union was visible through a window in Mr. Pardo’s home Friday. A spokesman for the Lockheed Martin Corporation, Jeffrey Adams, said he was unable to confirm that Mr. Pardo ever worked for the company.
After he was fired, Mr. Pardo traveled “to the Midwest and Northeast” for about a month, said Lieutenant Doonan, the lead investigator on the case, before returning to California in December to finalize the divorce from Sylvia Pardo, his wife of two years.
Mrs. Pardo petitioned for divorce last February, according to court papers. Public records indicate that Sylvia Pardo was married at least once before, and had lived in Texas and Oklahoma with a previous husband. After her divorce from him, she moved to California shortly before marrying Mr. Pardo.
Divorce papers state that the Pardos had no children together, though each had at least one child from previous relationships. None of those children were at the Christmas Eve party when Mr. Pardo began shooting, the police said.
Mr. Pardo had been ordered to pay $10,000 in cash to Mrs. Pardo by Dec. 19, though both waived rights to future spousal support. It was not known Friday if that money had been paid.
Mr. Pardo’s modest stucco house sits at the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains. On Friday a desk covered with stacks of court documents relating to his divorce could be seen through a window of a study at the front of the house. One document visible from the window was a copy of a discovery letter from Mr. Pardo’s lawyer to Mrs. Pardo’s attorney, Stanley Silver, requesting information about her assets and income.
Mr. Silver said that Mr. Pardo was trying to get child support payments since he was fired from his job last summer. Henry Baeza, who lives near Mr. Pardo and with his wife owns the Montrose Bakery, which Mr. Pardo visited several times a week, said he and several waitresses there knew him as a friendly loner and an adequate tipper.
“The last time I saw him was on Wednesday,” Mr. Baeza said. “He came in and told me happy Christmas. I was shocked when I heard what happened.”
Standing outside the ruins of the Ortega home on Thursday was Frank Castillo, who identified himself as the brother of Mrs. Pardo’s second ex-husband. Mr. Castillo said that Mrs. Pardo had a total of three children, an 8-year-old, Amanda; another daughter, Selina; and an adult son, Sal. Mr. Castillo said that his brother died several years ago in a car accident.
Mr. Castillo said that the children, especially Sal, complained about Mr. Pardo. “They said they were scared of Bruce, that he was a little bit aggressive,” he said. “Sal said he didn’t trust him. Bruce was a very quiet guy, but Sal didn’t trust him.”
Rebecca Cathcart reported from Covina, and Solomon Moore from Los Angeles and Montrose, Calif.
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