LOS ANGELES — After a Christmas Eve slaying in suburban Covina that left nine people dead, surviving family members on Sunday were grappling with how to best care for the victims’ children.
At least 13 young people were orphaned after the shooting and two others lost a parent, according to a family attorney.
“We have to help them,” said Jose Castillo, a relative who came out to the crime scene on Sunday to pay his respects.
The shooting on Christmas Eve was at the Ortega family home, about 25 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. The ex-husband of one of the Ortegas came to their annual party dressed as Santa Claus, armed with four semiautomatic weapons and an incendiary device.
The ex-husband, later identified by police as Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, left after family members were dead and the house was fully ablaze. Sixteen others at the holiday party survived by hiding under furniture or jumping out second-story windows and off the roof. Pardo later killed himself.
Castillo, the relative who visited Sunday, and his wife, Rocio, knew the Ortega family well.
“We would always eat together, typical Mexican food,” said 42-year-old Rocio Castillo as she stood outside the now-bulldozed, two-story Covina house.
Jose Castillo’s brother was first married to Sylvia Pardo, one of the Ortega children who died Christmas Eve, and fathered two of her three children before he was killed in a car crash in Arizona about 20 years ago.
Rocio and Jose Castillo had remained close with Sylvia and their niece and nephew, Selina and Sal Castillo, who escaped the mayhem on Christmas Eve.
Their former stepfather, Pardo, had just finalized his divorce with Sylvia about a week before the shootings.
Now parentless, the Castillos wondered how best to care for Selina and Sal, and said family members were trying to work out who would be the young people’s guardians, who would help support them, and where they would stay.
“There is feeling of total helplessness. … It has emotionally affected a lot of people in Covina,” said Mayor Pro Tem Walt Allen III, a retired 32-year police officer who oversaw the California Department of Corrections and served as a state narcotics agent and SWAT officer.
“Whenever you have an incident as horrific as this, the first thought is the kids left behind,” he said.
He said mental health professionals are being brought in to help not only the family but also neighbors and members of the community of less than 50,000 people.
“Covina is hometown America. We’re like a Midwest town. We’re a child-and-family oriented community. It chills me what occurred,” Allen said. “This is devastating and the most horrific crime in the history of Covina.”
Bruce Pardo’s mother, 72-year-old Nancy Windsor, said over the weekend that she spoke with Sal Castillo on the phone and wanted to establish a fund for him and the rest of her former daughter-in-law’s family.
“Anything that our family realized from Bruce’s vehicle, from the money on him, whenever that’s released, everything is going to my grandchildren. I want it for my grandchildren,” Windsor said.
Jack Bodger, president of the company where Sylvia Pardo worked in El Monte, said the company was also in the process of setting up a trust for her three children.
“She’s been with us about five years at the company, and she was a really good employee. She was a very kind person, and always considerate of others, and had just a very good work ethic,” Bodger said in a telephone interview Sunday.
Scott Nord, an attorney for the family, said relatives “are going to need financial help … because this is going to be a massive, massive funeral cost.”
Police also continued their investigation over the weekend and found another of Pardo’s vehicles. The gray 1999 Toyota RAV 4 was found late Saturday in Glendale.
Covina Police Lt. Pat Buchanan said investigators were concerned the vehicle rented by Bruce Jeffrey Pardo last week could have been rigged in a similar fashion to another rental car that blew up Thursday as Sheriff’s bomb experts were investigating it.
Police found no evidence of explosives or a triggering device in the RAV 4, but recovered a canister of gasoline, water bottles, camping supplies, wrapped Christmas presents, two computers, and a map of Mexico.
Allen said it appeared as though Pardo “had been planning this a long time.”
“This didn’t occur overnight,” Allen said. “With domestic violence incidents you just don’t see them coming until it’s too late,” he said.
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