Seeds of Tragedy : Crime: Brad Powers Jr. and his dad shared a private world of love and rage. When it dissolved, 2 innocent people died.

So great was his love for his father that Brad Powers Jr.--twisted, confused, and consumed with vodka and grief--sought to avenge his anguish with bloodshed on Easter weekend.

Gun drawn, he stalked into the Mission Bay Memorial Hospital emergency room, where his father had died just hours earlier. He chose a place of healing for a scene of revenge, killing two hospital workers and wounding two other people, police said.

“Those two days were the most traumatic, horrible experience I ever had in my life, the way they did my father wrong,” Brad Powers Jr. said, sitting in jail, still convinced the hospital had improperly cared for his father, Brad Powers Sr., 75, a nationally known architectural illustrator. “I loved my father, that’s what’s on my mind now. It’s a horrible, horrible tragedy.”

In his grief, Brad cannot see how, in seeking an outlet for his rage, he has spread pain and anguish in a widening circle.

“It’s devastating--I can hardly talk or read,” said Florence Burke, the mother of Deborah Kay Burke, a nurse killed in the rampage. “The loss can’t be measured. It’s so total and unbearable, and it doesn’t go away with her burial.”

For 46 years, the lives of Brad Powers Jr. and his father had been bound together. Brad had never held a job; he lived with his parents at home and leaned on his father to raise his own two children.

Yet, sometimes in fits of anger, he would turn on his father and strike him. Neighbors along Castle Hills Drive remember police cars parked outside the Powers’ front gate. Once, the elder Powers tried to commit his son for mental problems.

But the family held strong. His parents paid for Brad’s divorce and custody battle, and even coached him on what to say in court.

During a brief stint in the Coast Guard, he fell from a ladder and injured his back. A doctor prescribed a painkiller that had a lasting effect on Brad and made him sometimes act strangely, his mother said. Although unable to recall the name of the drug, Brad said he has disliked doctors ever since.

Even today, although admitting to the shooting rampage, Brad does not believe it was truly his fault. He was drunk, he said--although police say tests show he was not. He still blames the hospital and said he is sure people will understand his actions once they learn the circumstances.

“What the hospital did was murder,” he said. “If the hospital hadn’t been negligent, if they cared for my father the way they should have, this whole damn tragedy never would have taken place.”

The Powers family lived in an ocean-view home on La Jolla’s Mt. Soledad, with five dogs and 12 cats. Brad handled the household chores. His father sketched in the small, cluttered studio next to the swimming pool.

“We were a family that was a good team,” Brad said, adding that his father, “was just the most wonderful man a son could have. We shared every day together, for years and years and years.”

But all was not well inside that home.

The “good team” did not include Brad’s brother, Charles Powers, 51, an assistant vice chancellor for design at UC Irvine. He says he has been estranged from his brother and mother for 25 years. He declined to explain further.

The Powers were a proud family, and a private one. And not many neighbors, friends or even Charles Powers really ever knew all that went on inside the gracious home, carefully hidden from the road by trees and shrubs.

The elder Powers had come to Southern California in the 1920s when he was 9 years old, after his father, stricken with polio, had tired of slipping on Chicago’s icy sidewalks. By the 1930s, he had his first illustrating job, painting color posters for movies playing at the Fox theater. He drew Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster and actor Leo Carillo as a bandit. He parlayed that work, at 19, into a job as an architectural illustrator and drew renderings for some prestigious projects.

He worked on some San Diego landmarks: the County Administration Center, the Civic Theatre, the Westgate Hotel. By the 1950s and ‘60s, he had earned a national reputation.

“I enjoy making something that’s needed beautiful,” he once said of his work, “rather than making it ugly.”

He spent many days in his studio, which was entered through two sliding glass doors. The studio walls were covered with rough pencil sketches and drawings. His 106-year-old desk once belonged to his grandfather. The lingering smell of smoke from his pipe wafted throughout the house.

“He had this Norman Rockwellian way about him,” said Jonathan Finfer, a San Diego architect who, three years ago, organized an art exhibit highlighting Powers’ work. “He had this high-pitched laugh. You would just roll back and laugh with him, and then you could see he was in ill health. He would cough for 15 seconds when he told his stories, and all you could think of was, ‘Get some help.’ ”

The elder Powers often was treated at Mission Bay hospital, where he was such a regular that he referred to the nursing staff as “my girls.” He would walk into the emergency room, and, without even checking in, hook himself to the machine that evaluated his weak pulmonary condition.

A month before his death, Powers filled out a “Star Card,” praising the hospital emergency room. “Emphysema sometimes brings me here feeling as if I have one foot in the grave,” he wrote. After being treated, “I go out back to my flamenco dancing again.”

As his father grew weaker, Brad grew more and more responsible for running the small household. He shopped and cooked, maintained the pool and tended the family menagerie.

“I carried the load of the household, I kept the place running,” he said. “I am a pretty responsible fellow. Just because you are not working a particular job doesn’t mean you are not working.”

His mother, friends and neighbors describe this gentle side. “I have never seen Brad Jr. when he was anything but a considerate, thoughtful, good neighbor,” said Beatrice England, who has known the Powers family for more than 25 years. “In any dealings I had with him, he has been very polite and friendly.”

Mary Powers, 73, says her son was a “very sweet little boy who was very bright.” He worked hard on the family boat and soon became an able sailor who was well-liked by his peers, she said: “He had friends all over. I know Brad does not have anything mentally wrong.”

His father had designed the main clubhouse at the Mission Bay Yacht Club, where his son first learned to sail, winning teen-age trophies. “He was real active and real handsome, and the girls all had crushes on him,” said a club official.

Six feet tall, with blond-brown hair and blue eyes, Brad has a boyish face and an athletic build that makes him look younger than his age.

“He was the sweetest, nicest guy you could hope to meet,” said Mary Hayward, whom Brad escorted to the senior prom. She had not seen him after graduation until she visited him recently in jail. “He’s so sensitive,” she said. “I just think he snapped.”

There were earlier emotional problems. When Brad was 21, his father filed a petition in San Diego Superior Court. Powers said his son appeared to be mentally troubled and took the first steps to commit him. A doctor had told them Brad was “in an acute psychotic episode and appears to be on the verge of violence,” Powers said in the court petition. “He refused to take the prescribed medicine. He was admitted to the psychiatric ward as an emergency.”

But within five days, Powers had dropped his efforts and withdrawn the petition. Asked about this episode, Brad recalled suffering an “emotional disturbance from an over-prescribed tranquilizer” that was supposed to ease upper back pain.

“That’s when I started having bad feelings towards doctors,” he said. “That caused an emotional disturbance, and it almost killed me. I carried that along many, many years. It took me five years to pull out of that thing.”

Brad believes he recuperated from that episode. When his four-year marriage to Jeanne Evelyn Powers ended in divorce in 1971, court papers made no mention of his mental illness.

The court battle over custody of their two children, Warren and Laura, raged for years, with Brad’s father backing him in countless fights until custody finally was awarded to the youngsters’ grandparents and father.

Many saw Powers and his wife--not Brad--as the driving force in the fight over the children.

“Brad was an incredibly weak man with no backbone,” said a family attorney, who requested anonymity. “He had an excuse for everything he might have ever done wrong. Brad was very unhealthy. He was being controlled by his parents, and he seemed to regurgitate what they told him to say. He wasn’t effective as a human being.”

Neighbors recalled strange events. Dorene Guerrazzi, 22, said she would sunbathe in her back yard, only to hear Brad tromp down the hill and offer her money for sex. Once, she said, he threw a rock with a $50 bill and a note wrapped around it, asking her to “spread her legs.” She called police. “He just seemed strange,” she said. “He seemed lonely.”

He also sometimes physically abused his father.

“There were only two or three occasions, and they were extremely mild,” Brad said. “I never hit him, it was a slap here and there--like fathers and sons do. It was a minor thing really, that was all it was. On one occasion, I went overboard and he had me arrested.”

But after his death, a family member asked that coroners investigate to ascertain that abuse did not contribute to the elder Powers’ demise, said Dr. H.E. Hammerstead, the surgeon who had operated on him. The coroners’ office, however, found no evidence of abuse.

Brad’s mother said her son’s spats with his father were not serious. “They had disagreements off and on because they loved each other,” she said. “They did talk back and forth. My husband was always yelling at everybody. (But) my son wouldn’t touch a flea, he wasn’t that type of person. He did disagree with his dad, but he loved him. If he hadn’t loved him, he wouldn’t have spent his life taking care of him.”

The elder Powers felt tremendous pressure to support the household and postponed retirement, said Marvin Mizeur, another lawyer who has known the family for 16 years. “It was not a pleasant situation for Brad Sr. for the last 10 years,” said Mizeur. Powers had told him Brad verbally abused him constantly, Mizeur said--a contention the son denies.

“I am a good guy,” Brad said. “I never hurt anybody in my life. I never hit anyone with a closed fist, never pointed a gun until this horrible, horrible incident.”

But, he added, “you never know, you wake up on a Friday morning, and you never know what the day is going to turn out to be like.”

Friday, April 13, began like any other day for Brad Powers Jr.

After returning from the grocery store, he learned his father had gone to Mission Bay Memorial Hospital. He was not upset. His father was overweight and had a history of heart and lung problems.

The senior Powers appeared in the emergency room, complaining of shortness of breath. “He was adequately evaluated and treated and released in good condition,” said Dr. Harry Henderson, the hospital’s chief-of-staff-elect.

Powers returned to the emergency room the next morning, complaining of abdominal pain. The diagnosis: a ruptured aneurysm. Doctors telephoned Brad at home and told him they needed to operate to save his father’s life, Henderson said. “His attitude was that, ‘If you’re going to operate on him, don’t do it until I get there,’ ” the doctor recalled.

Brad “arrived prior to the surgery and the (lead) surgeon had a chance to discuss with him just how serious the situation was,” Henderson said. “He was very concerned that his father was going to have an operation, but what he didn’t realize at first was that without an operation his father was going to die. And once he realized that, he calmed down.”

But during surgery, the elder Powers suffered a heart attack and died, despite what doctors said were their every efforts to save him.

Told of his father’s death, Brad grew agitated and upset. He screamed that doctors had not done enough to save his dad. He was furious that his father had been sent home the day before, angry that doctors had gone ahead with the surgery, despite his father’s frail condition.

Brad went home, the house sadly dark and silent without his father. He drank heavily from a large bottle of vodka, he said.

Then, suddenly, without a word, he grabbed the .22-caliber handgun the family kept at home for protection, started the Corvette his parents had bought him and drove back to the hospital.

Shortly before 5 p.m., eight hours after his father’s death, the staff and patients in the emergency room were jolted by a scream, a man yelling: “You killed my father!”

The roar of gunfire resounded through the room.

Nurse Deborah Kay Burke and Edward Thomas Rooney, a medical trainee, were killed. Fred Mowrer, a patient’s father, was shot once in the backside. Dr. Michael Hughes--a physician who just hours before had tried to comfort the obviously distraught Brad about his father’s death--was wounded with a spray of gunfire, hit possibly five times.

Burke, a vibrant, funny “aerobics-olic” who had been a nurse for 12 years, was preparing to take a vacation in Germany with her boyfriend. That Saturday shift was one of the few remaining before her trip. Burke, 36, had treated the elder Powers during some of his emergency room visits, but hospital officials were unsure whether she saw him on the day of his death.

Burke was sitting at the long white nurses’ desk when the gunman stormed in. She tried to scramble under her chair but was shot once in the chest. Bleeding and confused, she ran outside and begged an elderly couple in a car in the parking lot to drive her to another hospital.

Bewildered, they pointed back at the hospital.

Burke ran back inside and collapsed. She died of her wounds two hours later.

Rooney, 30, a student, was three hours into his shift when, police said, Brad entered the emergency room. Rooney, engaged to be married in October, had to spend eight hours observing doctors and nurses to graduate from an emergency medicine course. He was not at the hospital when the elder Powers had been there.

Rooney was watching Hughes treat an elderly woman in the three-bed emergency room when the gunman entered. After Rooney was shot, he fell to the floor. The gunman walked over to him and fired once more, killing him.

Mowrer, a lawyer from Albuquerque, N.M., visiting San Diego that Easter weekend, was in the hospital for the first time. He had brought his daughter Chelsea, 2, in for treatment for the flu.

“He didn’t look like a crazy man,” Mowrer said of the gunman. “I was looking at him and I saw the gun coming up. I turned to avoid him. I didn’t even know I was shot. I fell to the ground. I had just seen him shoot (Rooney) on the ground and thought, ‘I am not going to let him do that to me.’ ”

Mowrer fell. He did not realize he was shot until he saw his green shorts were stained red with blood.

Brad, back in his car, fled the scene. He headed north toward Oregon.

“I love Oregon. I have always loved Oregon--it’s beautiful, serene, pleasant,” he said.

But “I realized it was just a matter of time, and they would get me on the freeway. I figured if they got me on the highway, they might blow me away.”

So, 40 miles from the hospital, he turned off Interstate 5 and stopped at a pay phone. He called Oceanside police and confessed.

Today, under $2.5 million bail, Brad faces two charges of murder and three of attempted murder. In his jail cell, he said, he has pinned sailing pictures on the wall.

He is bitter about the events that put him there.

“It’s a damn wonder that things didn’t turn out worse than they did. . . . I will always feel towards the hospital what I feel now,” he said.

“I have always loved animals. Animals never turn on you no matter what happens, they are totally devoted and dedicated. If only people were more like dogs,” he says with a laugh.

Brad said he worried about jeopardizing his legal defense--a preliminary hearing in his case is set for June--but he agreed to speak to The Times on four separate occasions.

Although he said he did not want to discuss his defense, he added: “It was temporary insanity. . . . When you go flipping out the way I did there, you don’t realize that you don’t know what you are doing.

“The hospital did my father wrong,” he said. “That’s why I am in this tragedy.

“I feel very horrible about the people, the families. I can’t bring those people back. I can’t bring my father back either.

“When these facts come out, there will be plenty of people who can tell what kind of person I am. Hopefully, they won’t condemn me. Hopefully, they will understand a fellow who snapped under the circumstances.”