SANTA MONICA, Calif. — A woman who was wounded in the Santa Monica shooting spree died Sunday, bringing the total number of victims killed by the gunman to five.
Marcela Franco, 26, died at UCLA Medical Center, according to Santa Monica College spokeswoman Tricia Ramos.
Franco had been a passenger in a Ford Explorer driven by her father, campus groundskeeper Carlos Navarro Franco, 68, who also was killed in Friday’s attack.
Police Sgt. Richard Lewis confirmed the suspect’s identity Sunday as John Zawahri.
The heavily armed man’s attack against his father and older brother at their home led to the violence on the streets of Santa Monica, lasting just minutes until he was shot to death at the college library by police.
Authorities hadn’t immediately named the shooter or the two men found dead in the house because next of kin was out of the country and hadn’t been notified. Lewis said his name was released Sunday after his mother cut her trip short and came back to the country.
Lewis said she was being interviewed by investigators.
“A big piece of the puzzle just came home,” he said.
The husband of a woman shot during the rampage said a bullet nicked his wife’s ear and she’ll likely have to live with shrapnel in her shoulder. Debra Lynn Fine, 50, was released late Saturday from Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, according to a hospital statement.
The killer, who died a day shy of his 24th birthday, was connected to the home that went up in flames after the first shootings, said police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks. His father, identified as 55-year-old Samir Zawahri, and 24-year-old brother Christopher, lived in the house.
SWAT team officers searched the mother’s Los Angeles apartment and officers interviewed neighbors about the son who lived with her, said Beverly Meadows who lives next door.
After neighbors watched in shock as he shot at his father’s house and it went up in flames, he opened fire on a woman driving by, wounding her, and then carjacked another woman.
He directed her to drive to the college, ordering her stop along the way to shoot at a city bus and people on the street. Two people on the bus were injured.
On campus, he opened fired on a Ford Explorer driven by Navarro Franco, who plowed through a brick wall into a faculty parking lot.
The gunman moved on foot across campus, firing away. Trena Johnson, who works in the dean’s office, said she saw a man in black with a “very large gun” shoot a woman in the head outside the library. That victim died at a hospital.
The shooter fired at least 70 rounds in the library. Two Santa Monica police officers and a campus officer then arrived and killed the shooter.
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