Pincay’s Wife Is Critical After Gunshot Suicide Try

Linda Pincay, 37, the wife of jockey Laffit Pincay, shot herself in the head at the Pincays’ Los Feliz home late Friday afternoon in what police said was a suicide attempt, and was being kept alive Saturday only by a life-support system in Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital.

She was listed in critical condition Saturday night.

News of her attempted suicide, at 4:30 p.m. Friday, according to Hollywood Division police, spread Saturday at Santa Anita, where Laffit Pincay is riding at the current meeting. It cast a pall over the jockeys’ room, where many of Pincay’s fellow riders had witnessed the jockey’s reaction to a frantic phone call from his 14-year-old daughter, Lisa, minutes after the shooting. Telling the stewards he had a “family emergency,” Pincay canceled his ride in the ninth race Friday and hurried to the hospital.

Lisa Pincay reportedly was at home when the shooting occurred, separated from her mother and a .22-caliber pistol by a locked bedroom door. The Pincays have one other child, Laffit III, who is 9.

Linda Pincay was in ill health most of last year, never having fully recovered from a ruptured appendix suffered in the spring. Laffit rushed her to the hospital on the day of her appendix attack and later said she had almost died.

Pincay was the winning jockey last year in the Kentucky Derby after 10 unsuccessful tries, but Linda, who had undergone minor surgery for adhesions the day before the race, was unable to be at Churchill Downs. She had been a spectator for his 10 previous Derby rides.

Laffit called her from Louisville after he won aboard Swale.

“Does this mean I can’t go again?” she asked her husband.

“Of course not,” he said.

Despite a weight loss, Linda resumed attending the races at Del Mar last summer.

The daughter of the late William Radkovich, a horse owner and construction man who built the turf course at Hollywood Park, Linda Pincay met Laffit after he had ridden a horse for her father. Pincay asked her to go to a jockeys’ ball, and about a year later, in 1968, they were married.

Linda reportedly experienced acute abdominal pains in the months since her original illness, but four days after Christmas, she was the hostess for an extravaganza of a birthday party for her husband.

“She was determined to prove to everybody that she was all right,” Bill Shoemaker’s wife, Cindy, told friends. “The night of the birthday party (Laffit’s 38th) was her way of showing that she was OK.”

The tent party at the Pincays’ home was attended by about 300 people. “She seemed happy and didn’t appear to have any problems,” said Frank Olivares, one of the jockeys who attended.

Pincay has been in a slump this season at Santa Anita. He missed several days early in the meeting, saying he had the flu, and in one stretch rode 24 straight non-winning mounts. He has won with only 7 of 71 mounts, a 10% rate that is about 10 points below his career average.

“You knew there had to be something wrong,” trainer Noble Threewitt told Santa Anita racing secretary Lou Eilken the other day. “Laffit was making mistakes that you’d never see him normally make.”

Pincay once said that if he weren’t married to Linda, “I’d be gone by now.”

He meant that she gave him a sense of responsibility, kept his life in order. Linda Pincay was once described as being “like a celebrity politician’s wife. She is fiercely loyal, totally involved, deadly certain that her mate can do no wrong.”

A few days ago, Linda had called the public relations department at Santa Anita, asking them to remind Laffit to bring home a few of the track’s 1985 souvenir calendars.

Jockey Terry Lipham said Saturday what many others were saying: “I can’t imagine Laffit surviving without her. On the track, he’s the best, but away from the track he really needed her help.”