Santa Shooter @ Xmas Eve Party!

[3113]

My gawd! Did you hear about this? It's just awful. From the L.A. Times:

As he had in years past, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo volunteered to serve as an usher at his church's midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. Pardo, however, was miles away from the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church as the religious service got underway. He had driven a rental car from his home in Montrose to the Covina home of his ex-wife's parents. Shortly before 11:30 p.m., dressed as Santa Claus, he approached the front door with a large, wrapped package.

Inside the two-story home at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac, his ex-wife, her parents and about two dozen others were enjoying their annual holiday party. An 8-year-old girl ran to answer his knock. When the door swung open, Pardo, 45, shot her in the face with a semiautomatic handgun, stepped into the house and opened fire on the revelers. Amid the chaos, he doused the house with a flammable liquid contained in the package -- a pressurized fuel tank, about 2 1/2 feet tall.

Partygoers fled in panic as the house on Knollcrest Drive went up in flames. They ran to neighbors' homes and frantically called 911. A young woman, according to a neighbor, leaped out of a second-floor window, breaking her ankle. The 8-year-old girl and a 16-year-old girl who was shot in the back survived and were transported to local hospitals with non-life-threatening injuries, officials said. Eight bodies remained in the ruins of the house, coroner officials later said.

...The investigation, which began quickly and continued into Christmas Day, led to two other Southern California homes: Pardo's and his brother's, where Pardo was found dead. It revealed a divorce, the flammable device like the one Pardo took into the Covina home -- police said they'd never seen anything like it -- and incredulous reactions from people who knew Pardo as a reliable church usher and good, but quiet, neighbor. By late Thursday night, authorities weren't even close to identifying all the victims, although his former wife and her parents are thought to have been killed....

Latest info is that nine are dead, and that Pardo had money strapped to him and a ticket to Canada. He also planted a pipe bomb in a car!

 

[fifty5]

Too simple to write him off as a nutter - the poor sod must have been driven round the bend by something!

 

[voluptuary_manque]

When some people go crazy, they go all the way. Those poor, poor people.

 

[3113]

Too simple to write him off as a nutter - the poor sod must have been driven round the bend by something!

Here's more on the story:

Police said today that a gunman dressed in a Santa Claus suit who killed nine holiday revelers at a Christmas Eve party in Covina and torched their house was found with $17,000 in cash strapped to his body and an early-morning plane ticket to Canada for Christmas Day. In a news conference this afternoon, Covina police said Bruce Jeffrey Pardo drove 40 miles to his brother's house in Sylmar after the rampage with third-degree burns on both arms and the Santa Claus suit melted onto his skin.

...Officials also said that Pardo used a homemade device to spray racing fuel around the house and that the vapor could have been ignited by a pilot light or a candle. Lt. Tim Doonan of the Covina Police Department said four handguns were recovered from the scene and all were empty. Each weapon could hold up to 13 rounds. According to witnesses, when Pardo entered the house he fired one of the guns indiscriminately...Pardo had booby-trapped his rental car, which he parked about a block from his brother's house in Sylmar. A Santa suit inside was attached to a trigger that lit a flare. There were was 200 rounds of ammunition inside the vehicle.

Pardo, 45, had been divorced earlier this year, and authorities believe the divorce was one of the main factors that drove him to go to the home of his former in-laws on Christmas Eve with the guns and explosives. But one incident that led to that divorce was a long-held detail of his past that Pardo hid from his wife. About nine years ago, he and a girlfriend had a child. As a 1-year-old, the boy fell into a pool, nearly drowning. As a result, the child was left physically handicapped. Although Pardo did not support his son financially, he claimed the boy as a dependent for seven years on his tax returns.

When Pardo's wife found out about it from a family member, she demanded he stop claiming his son as a dependent. The situation helped lead to the divorce, sources close to the family said....the settlement hearing had turned ugly.

...Other details about Pardo emerged today. According to his divorce papers, he was fired in July from his job as a software engineer at ITT, a defense contractor in Van Nuys. A spokesman said Pardo worked in the air and surface surveillance radar division for three years, but declined to say whether he left of his own accord or was fired. Another source said he had once worked at Northrop Grumman Corp. and that he had claimed on his company profile that he had a master's degree from USC. But the source said that although he had been enrolled there, he never received the degree.

Investigators said the shooting probably had been planned over a period of several months.

More here.