Gunman Triggers JPL Siege

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena was under armed siege Thursday after a gunman in a commandeered car with three terrified hostages careened onto the grounds and exchanged shots with Pasadena police before taking refuge in the famed space complex.

Although the three elderly hostages were rescued unharmed when the car crashed near a guard shack shortly before noon, the man fled on foot in a flurry of gunfire and took cover in one building and then another.

By late afternoon, with approximately 6,000 JPL employees finally evacuated or sent home early and with Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Special Weapons Team members helping Pasadena officers search the 76-acre complex, the unidentified gunman still had not been found.

Officers believed he had managed to get up a hill into Building 79, housing the wind tunnel. It was surrounded by sharpshooters and dogs and a loudspeaker was used to urge him to surrender. He was addressed by the name “Tim Housey,” but police could not confirm that spelling of the name.

“Attention,” he was told. “This is security. We know you have committed a robbery, and we want you to give yourself up.”

The gunman was told to either identify himself to an officer or to pick up any telephone and call police.

Officers would not explain whom the gunman was suspected of robbing.

A relative of the gunman was being taken to the scene to try to persuade him to give himself up, it was reported.

JPL spokeswoman Mary Beth Murrill said she had been told by JPL security officers that the gunman was an employee of a contractor doing work for the laboratory, the center of unmanned American space exploration and located north of Devil’s Gate Reservoir in the hills of La Canada-Flintridge.

According to Pasadena Police Sgt. David Harris, the episode began several miles away at Lincoln Avenue and Palisades Street, northeast of the Rose Bowl, where the man brandishing a pistol pushed his way into a small car containing two women and a man. There were unconfirmed reports of a holdup in that neighborhood, but Harris would not discuss that.

The car sped northward on the Foothill Freeway with police in pursuit, then turned onto Oak Grove Drive, which leads to the southern entrance of JPL. Harris said the car roared onto the grounds and crashed near a guard shack. The man leaped out and the gun battle ensued.

“I haven’t heard that much gunfire since I was in Vietnam,” said Johnny Guerino, foreman of a construction contractor’s crew working on the grounds.

He estimated that about 60 rounds were fired in the shoot-out. Police said it was only about 10.

While the three hostages were taken from the car by police, the gunman first ran into an office building. It was reported he got out of there by seizing a vacuum cleaner and scurrying away with frightened employees.

JPL spokesman Frank O’Donnell said he understood that the gunman demanded a maintenance man’s janitorial company shirt to aid his deception. A shirtless man was questioned later, then released.

Although police sealed off the complex and ordered three buildings evacuated immediately, approximately 3,500 other employees initially were directed over a public address system to remain in their buildings. They were told to be on the lookout for an armed and dangerous man, possibly bleeding from his left hand.

“Here we are,” complained one employee “in a dangerous situation, and they were telling us to go back to work.”

The three white-haired hostages were driven away by a Pasadena detective. They were not identified. There was a report that one hostage told police the gunman said to them, “Nobody in this car will get hurt but I think I’m going to die today.”

Employees’ cars were searched as the work force departed.

Late in the afternoon, many JPL employees were still standing outside the chain-link fence that surrounds the grounds watching the cautious movement of flak-jacketed officers making their search. Three helicopters clattered noisily over the normally peaceful hills.