Note in Jacket Sheds Little Light on Office Slaying, Suicide

The note found in the jacket of Fidel Gonzalez Jr. the morning he gunned down his boss and then killed himself at the state Employment Development Department office in Garden Grove answered few questions about the murder-suicide, officials said Wednesday.

“This is to attest I, Fidel Gonzalez, job agent at Garden Grove EDD . . . am solely responsible for the destruction of all my job agent (files), present fiscal year and past,” read the note, found in Gonzalez’s breast pocket following the Monday morning shootings. “I hope this will alleviate a lot of stress from my coworkers and set them free,” he concluded before signing his name.

Office Reopens

As the employment office opened Wednesday for the first time since the violent episode, State Police officials, who are investigating the deaths because they occurred in a state office, released the text of the brief note and what they called the results of their investigation.

“We don’t know what he meant by the note,” said Anne Garbeff, a State Police spokeswoman. “A search was made of the files he was assigned and working on, and none were missing. They were all complete and intact.”

Garden Grove police said there had been “some words of disagreement between the two last week”; co-workers and a close friend said Gonzalez, 53, was upset because his boss, Louis H. Zuniga, had chastised him for being behind in his work and for taking home case files. Colleagues said Gonzalez had wanted to transfer out of the office because he felt he was under too much pressure.

Another co-worker said Wednesday that written complaints about Zuniga, the 50-year-old manager of the office, had been filed with his supervisors.

“The department is acknowledging some of the problems, but because it was a personnel matter, it’s not our policy to comment,” Suzanne Schroeder, spokeswoman for the Employee Development Department, said Wednesday. “There was a personnel problem. Whether that was the problem (that prompted the shooting) I have no idea.”

A friend of Zuniga said Wednesday that the former La Habra city councilman and state president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) was extremely devoted to helping the poor and unemployed and was “one of the warmest, most people-oriented persons I had ever met.” He also said Zuniga had “no tolerance” for people whom he viewed as inefficient or “slow.”

“I was so impressed with his zeal for wanting to help people,” said Robert McLaren, a Cal State Fullerton professor of child development who first met Zuniga at a 1969 countywide poverty seminar.

“I’ve known him ever since then, and I’ve just been really impressed with the zeal and efficiency in which he did work,” McLaren said. “And I can see how he might have alienated people who were looking for a nice cushy state job. But, if he pushed other people hard, he pushed himself even harder.”

McLaren, like other friends and colleagues of Zuniga and Gonzalez, said they had no idea what disagreement the two men had that could have led to Monday morning’s murder-suicide before a dozen horrified witnesses.

According to Garbeff, investigators have determined that the following sequence of events took place:

Gonzalez came into the office at 9738 Garden Grove Blvd. about 7 a.m. and reported to his work area. His supervisor, Zuniga, asked to see Gonzalez in Zuniga’s glass-walled office.

“Mr. Gonzalez started to walk towards Mr. Zuniga but then went back to his desk, got a piece of paper and went into the men’s room,” Garbeff said.

After a short period, Gonzalez came out of the restroom and approached Zuniga’s desk in the private office.

“There was a brief conversation of several minutes,” Garbeff said, “then four shots in rapid succession, a pause, and then a last shot.”

There were no raised voices, Garbeff said. Witnesses, including co-workers, did not hear any of the conversation.

A coroner’s autopsy found that Zuniga was struck by one bullet that entered his upper right arm, traveled across his chest cavity and lodged in the left lung area, inflicting severe damage to several main arteries in his neck, Garbeff said. Zuniga bled to death, a deputy coroner said.

Garbeff said the autopsy revealed Gonzalez shot himself with a bullet that entered his right temple near his eye and exited through the top of his head. She said lab work to determine if drugs or alcohol were present in Gonzalez’s blood have not been completed. Police said Gonzalez purchased the Brazilian-made .38-caliber revolver from a Westminster gun store in mid-January.

Investigators have not determined a motive, nor have they drawn any conclusions from the information they have, Garbeff and Schroeder said.

Thus, friends and colleagues said they were left speculating Wednesday about the “personnel problem” between the supervisor and his worker.

“(Zuniga) never mentioned anything about that,” McLaren said of the alleged dispute. “ . . . They brought him back to work for the state to clean up the work that was going on. He simply could not tolerate inefficiency when the people who suffered were the poor and unemployed. And he found an awful lot of goldbricking in the work going on there. I think that probably festered some of the hard feelings with some of the employees.”

Both Zuniga and Gonzalez joined the EDD in 1969. Both worked extensively with LULAC and other Latino organizations. Both had served as state directors of LULAC.

While Zuniga rose to the rank of office director at the Employment Development Department, Gonzalez remained a case agent, working with people especially difficult to place in jobs, Schroeder said. Other co-workers said Gonzalez, father of three children, was very well liked by colleagues and clients alike.

Community Service Recognition

Both men had received commendations for their community service.

Zuniga had served with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N. C., and then went to work as an engineer in the aerospace industry, McLaren said. He later transferred to a Autonetics, a division of North American Rockwell. In 1971, Zuniga was sent by the U.S. Department of Labor to Japan, where he acted as an adviser to servicemen trying to re-enter the civilian work force. Before he left that job in 1975, Zuniga achieved the rank of GS-15, the civilian equivalent of a colonel. McLaren said he is also a close friend of Zuniga’s wife, a secretary in Cal State Fullerton’s teacher education program. He said “she was so stunned by this she can’t even talk.”