Archives September 2018

Monday, December 29, 2008

At least nine people have been killed in a two-story house in Covina, California, after a man dressed in a full Santa Claus outfit opened fire at a Christmas Eve party and then set the house ablaze. Covina is a city in Los Angeles County, California about 22 miles (35 km) east of downtown Los Angeles.

According to local police, the Christmas party at the 1100 block of East Knollcrest Drive was attended by about 25 people. Trend News Agency said that the gunman fired two semi-automatic handguns and used an apparently home-made pressurized device to spread some kind of accelerant. As the guests tried in vain to escape, the gunman used his ‘present’ to spray inflammable liquid that started the raging blaze. Reports from the scene said Molotov cocktails were also used by the madman.

Media reports said the gunman was plotting vengeance against his ex-wife. Prime suspect, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, age 45, six-foot-three-inch, 250 pound (1.9 meter, 113 kilogram), an electrical engineer, is long time Roman Catholic church usher and a laid-off aerospace worker. He worked with ITT Electronic Systems, Radar Systems, in Van Nuys from February 2005 to July 2008, and as an engineer at Northrop Grumman for five months in 2005, according to Court records. He had also worked for about nine years at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena until 1994.

Pardo’s ex-sister-in-law, who escaped from the Covina house alive with her injured daughter, called 911. Police on Friday released her 911 audio.

Msnbc.com has reported that Pardo “has brown hair and blue eyes, and known to frequent La Crescenta and La Verne.” Court records reveal that Mr Pardo’s wife acrimoniously divorced him last September. The divorce decree was finalized December 18. Until earlier this year, he lived in the Sylmar house with his ex-wife and her three children. The marriage lasted barely a year. However, Pardo held no criminal record and had no history of violence.

There is some speculation that the divorce may have been caused by Pardo concealing a paraplegic child from a previous relationship. Matthew, his nine-year-old son, by another former girlfriend, Elena Lucano, became brain damaged when he fell into a backyard swimming pool on Jan. 6, 2001. Pardo kept this child a secret from his wife. Pardo owed her $10,000 as part of the divorce settlement, according to court documents that detailed a bitter split. He also lost a dog he doted on and did not get back a valuable wedding ring. Pardo complained in a court declaration that Sylvia Pardo was living with her parents, not paying rent, and had spent lavishly on a luxury car, gambling trips to Las Vegas, meals at fine restaurants, massages and golf lessons.

After the mass murder, Pardo put on his street clothes and drove his rental Dodge Caliber car to the house of his brother, Jimmy Pardo, in Sylmar, approximately 30 miles away from the crime scene, where he committed suicide from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His brother was not present in the home and he broke inside to enter in. It was believed that Pardo intended to flee to Canada by plane as he had bought an airline ticket to a flight there from Los Angeles to Moline, Illinois. However due to suffering from severe third-degree burns on both arms stemming from the blaze, he decided to go against the initial plan.

Police had found $17,000 cling-wrapped on his legs inside a girdle, the car key, and his rental car that had been parked on Herrick Avenue, one block from his brother’s house, which had been rigged by remnants of his Santa suit that would ignite a flame and detonate the car with black powder if removed. Also recovered from the scene were four 13-round capacity handguns that were each empty, and at least 200 rounds of ammunition. Suggesting that what had been inside the car was being treated as a threat, police fired an incendiary device into it, destroying and burning it.

The police found on early Thursday, Mr Pardo bore a single gunshot wound to the head. According to LA County coroner’s official Ed Winter, the bodies found in the ashes were “extremely charred and burned.” All three of Sylvia Pardo’s children — Selina, Sal and Amanda — survived. According to the Scott Nord, the Ortega family lawyer, “the entire family was wiped out, and there’s basically like 16 orphans.”

Three other party guests have injuries, according to police. A 16-year-old girl was shot in the back, and an eight-year-old girl suffered facial gunshot wounds that were not life-threatening, while a 20-year-old woman had a broken ankle, after jumping from a second-story window, the police specified. About 80 firefighters put off the fire that soared fifteen metres (40 to 50 feet) high for more than one hour. The police discovered two handguns at the scene, and found two more in the in-laws’ house. Media reports on Friday said the 16-year-old daughter of Sylvia Pardo was released from Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

Meanwhile, investigators served a search warrant at Pardo’s Montrose house, where they retrieved evidence of high-octane racing fuel, five empty boxes for semi-automatic handguns, as well as two shotguns.

Covina police Lt. Pat Buchanan on Saturday said they are looking for Pardo’s rented gray 1999 RAV4, with California license plate 5RYD562. Police have found the second rental car Saturday night in a Glendale, California but found no bombs nor any explosives.

The police also revealed Saturday the names of nine people missing since the Christmas Eve massacre occurred. They are Pardo’s ex-wife, Sylvia Pardo, 43; her parents, Joseph Ortega, 80, and Alicia Ortega, 70; Alicia Ortiz, 46, and her son, Michael Ortiz, 17; Sylvia’s brother, Charles Ortega, 50, and his wife, Cheri, 45; another brother, James Ortega, 52, and his wife, Teresa, 51, according to Lt. Buchanan. “Hopefully, we’ll get positive identifications early next week,” Covina Police Chief Kim Raney said.

A murder-suicide is an act in which an individual kills one or more other persons immediately before, or at the same time as, killing him or herself. According to the psychiatrist Karl A. Menninger, murder-suicide or murder and suicide are interchangeable acts – suicide sometimes forestalling murder, and vice versa.

Monday, February 1, 2010

A British couple kidnapped by Somali pirates last October require urgent help, according to AFP. Rachel and Paul Chandler, who were sailing to Tanzania from the Seychelles in their yacht when they were captured by pirates, told an AFP reporter that they did “are being badly treated”. The photographer for the news agency was accompanying a surgeon, Mohamed Helmi Hangul, who was permitted to visit the couple briefly on Thursday.

The couple have been separated from each other, and are suffering signs of stress. The wife is suffering from insomnia and is “mentally unwell” and “disorientated”. “I’m old, I’m 56 and my husband is 60 years old. We need to be together because we have not much time left,” she said.

The pirates responsible have threatened to execute the couple if their demands for a $7m ransom are not met. However, the British Foreign Office say that they will not pay any ransoms or “substantial concessions” to pirates. In a statement, the British Foreign Office said that they “remain in regular contact with the family and are providing support”. They are calling for the “safe and swift release” of the couple.

Monday, November 3, 2008

Madelyn Dunham, the maternal grandmother of United States 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama, has died of cancer at 86, just one day before the election.

Dunham, who was born in Peru, Kansas in 1922, helped to raise Obama from the age of 10. She lived in Honolulu, Hawaii for most of her life, where she died peacefully in her apartment shortly before midnight local time.

“It is with great sadness that we announce that our grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died peacefully after a battle with cancer. She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility,” said Obama and his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng in a joint statement to the press.

During his acceptance speech for Democratic presidential nominee he noted her with the words, “She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life… She poured everything she had into me.”

Obama took time out from his presidential campaign in October to visit her at her bedside a week before she died.

Obama’s opponent John McCain also issued a statement saying his “thoughts and prayers go out” to Obama and his family.

“We offer our deepest condolences to Barack Obama and his family as they grieve the loss of their beloved grandmother. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them as they remember and celebrate the life of someone who had such a profound impact in their lives,” said McCain in a statement to the press.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ruled that Honolulu‘s ban on aerial advertising is constitutional and rejected the arguments of a pro-life/anti-abortion group that contended that the ban restricts free speech.

In a unanimous ruling, the court ruled that the city’s ban on aerial advertising is not pre-empted by federal law and violates neither the free speech provisions of the First Amendment nor the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Writing for the court, Judge Margaret McKeown wrote that “Honolulu’s airspace is a nonpublic forum, and the Ordinance is reasonable, viewpoint neutral, and rationally related to legitimate governmental interests.” (“Nonpublic forum” is defined as a place that is not traditionally or explicitly opened to free expression.)

The Center for Bioethical Reform (CBR) challenged Honolulu’s ban, claiming that the ban infringes on their right to public advocacy. The group planned to fly a plane towing a 100-foot banner showing graphic images of aborted fetuses, and contended that authorization they sought and received from the Federal Aviation Administration authorized the group to fly in all fifty states and Puerto Rico.

The CBR has driven vans with such images around Honolulu in the past few years.

Judge David Ezra, U.S. District Judge for Hawaii, ruled in November 2004 that the ordinance was constitutional. The appeal was argued before the 9th Circuit in Honolulu in November 2005.

Announcing their intent to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Gregg Cunningham, executive director of the CBR, said, “We never expected to get justice in the U.S. District Courts or in Honolulu. Our goal has always been to get to the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s the only place we feel we’ll get a fair hearing.

“If the environmental groups and political leftists who are trying to suppress the truth about abortion think we’re going to go away because we lost two cases that we fully expected to lose, they’re in for a rude awakening,” Cunningham said.

Hawaii has had a statewide prohibition on billboards and similar forms of advertising since 1927, and is unique among U.S. states in this regard. In addition, since 1957, Honolulu has had a comprehensive law regulating the size and content of signs. Honolulu’s ban on all aerial advertising was enacted in 1978.

Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann praised the decision, saying, “This obviously has strong implications for our visitor industry to know that when people come here they’re going to see things here that really make for an island paradise type of vacation. This is great news for us.”

Mary Steiner, head of the Outdoor Circle, an environmental group that supports the ban, said, “We have never doubted for a moment the importance of the scenic environment that it is just as important as any of the rest of the environmental issues that are out there. We’re not going to stand by and let it be destroyed in any way, shape or form.”