Local News in Brief : Escondido

Charged with murdering his girlfriend, an Escondido man told a Superior Court jury Monday that she attacked him with a gun and he shot her to death in self-defense.

Terrence Ruza, 40, testified calmly about the circumstances of the May 11 death of Leona Lara, 33, who lived with him.

“I did not shoot her intentionally,” Ruza said. “I tried to grab her. The gun went off.”

Lara was shot four times in the head, and her body was stuffed in a cardboard barrel. The body was discovered May 18 in a garage in San Diego that Ruza had rented under a false name.

Ruza said he was climbing a ladder in a garage on his property when his enraged girlfriend came at him.

“I must have grabbed her, and I don’t recall what happened,” Ruza said. “I saw her on the ground there. I didn’t know what to do at that point.”

The couple’s troubles began after Lara found court papers indicating that Ruza had been convicted of manslaughter in 1980, he said. She gave those papers to a neighbor and told “half a dozen” people of his conviction, he said.

Ruza was sentenced to four years in state prison for the 1979 killing of his wife, Pam Ruza, in Riverside.

A pathologist testified that two of Lara’s four head wounds were contact wounds, in which the gun was placed against the victim’s skin.

The jury is to begin deliberations Wednesday in the courtroom of Judge David Gill.