3 Workers Found Slain in Tustin Auto Store : Investigation: Robbery is suspected as the motive in killings that police described as ‘execution-style.’

A manager arriving for work Monday morning discovered the bodies of three young workers at an auto parts store who had been bound and shot in the head at close range in what police described as “execution-style” murders.

The slayings appeared to baffle investigators for much of the day. But late in the afternoon, they got a break that pointed to robbery as a motive.

After returning to the scene of the crime at 100 N. Tustin Ave., a Super Shops store manager pointed out that a safe, which appeared to investigators to have been secured, in fact had two separate components, with the day’s cash receipts kept in one of the halves.

Investigators plan today to match the firm’s computer receipts against the cash on hand at the store, in hopes of determining whether any money was stolen during the killings.

“We feel pretty confident right now that this was a robbery, but that’s still to be confirmed,” said Lt. Houston Williams, heading the investigation at the Tustin Police Department. “All we know for sure right now is that there’s a vicious individual or individuals out there that need to be apprehended.”

Police identified the victims as Darrell Esgar, 22, of Huntington Beach, an assistant manager; Chad Chadwick, 22, of Orange, a salesman; and Russel B. Williams, 21, of Seal Beach. All were single men, police said.

Within hours of the discovery of the men’s bodies, the president of the Super Shops chain put out a $50,000 reward for information on the killings. The Newport Beach-based company, founded 27 years ago by Harry Eberlin, has 154 stores nationwide.

“Right now, we really don’t know much,” company president Gregg Koechlein said. “The whole thing is just horrible.”

Two years ago--almost to the day--a Super Shops employee was shot and killed in a Long Beach store by a bandit who fled with $2,600 in cash. That murder was never solved. But Koechlein said he sees the two incidents as “completely dissimilar” in the way they were carried out, and police said they have no reason to believe the cases are connected.

Richard LaBare of Garden Grove, a Super Shops salesman, said he and the store manager arrived for work as usual around 9 a.m. and, after spending a few minutes in the store front, walked back to the storage room to see if anyone else was there yet.

“They were just lying there in the back room on the floor,” LaBare said in an interview.

LaBare said that just as he entered the storage room, the store manager, who was a few feet ahead of him, yelled for him to call 911.

“I thought he was joking at first, but when I saw the look on his face and saw that nobody was getting up off the floor to say, ‘Hey, this is a joke,’ I knew real fast that this was real serious.”

LaBare said there had been no recent scraps with customers or anything else that might explain what happened. “That’s what’s so weird about it. There’s just no reason for it. . . . The whole thing is just devastating, and right now, I don’t know what to think.”

Police could provide few answers either.

“This was execution-style in the way it was carried out,” Williams said as he stood outside the roped-off crime scene. “I haven’t seen anything like it in this city since probably the mid-70s.”

The three victims worked Sunday through the store’s closing at 5 p.m. Williams said the victims appeared to have been killed shortly after closing.

Alan Basham, a Super Shops regional sales manager, said two assistant managers at another Super Shops store reported that they stopped by the Tustin store around 10 or 10:30 p.m. Sunday and saw two cars parked outside. They peeked inside the store, looking for employees who might still have been working, but saw nothing, he said. The back room where the bodies were found is not visible from outside the store.

Sharon Chadwick, the mother of one of the victims, described the killings as “senseless.”

“He made friends with everybody real easy--that’s why he was in sales,” she said of her son, Chad.

“This is just something you deal with,” said Aron Chadwick, the victim’s 16-year-old brother.

Chad Chadwick loved to work on the white, striped Mustang that sat outside his Orange home, his mother said.

A neighbor of victim Darrel Esgar in Huntington Beach said that Esgar, too, labored over cars well into the night, a love that he shared with his father, Clayton.

Investigators said one of the victims had his hands and feet bound; another had just his hands tied; and the third had just his feet bound. They appeared to have been shot at “close range” with a handgun, Williams said.

All three victims still had their wallets and identification on them, apparently intact, when their bodies were found, Williams said.

The doors to the building were found locked Monday morning, leading investigators to theorize that the killer or killers may have forced the employees to lock the building before committing the murders, then escaped with with the doors locking automatically behind.

Merchants and residents in the commercial area said they heard nothing out of the ordinary Sunday night or early Monday morning. Shocked, they sought details of what had happened as they passed by the crime scene at the intersection of First Street and Tustin Avenue on the Tustin-Santa Ana border.

At other Super Shops stores around the area, employees feared for their own safety.

“You can’t help but worry that someone could come into this store, too,” said a worker in Costa Mesa who asked not to be identified. “But we’ve got more (employees) and this time we’ll be ready for them.”

Times staff writers Lucy Chabot, Tammerlin Drummond, George Frank and Matt Lait contributed to this report.