Apartment Intruder Guns Down Woman : Violence: The victim’s sister says her brother-in-law pulled the trigger. Later, he is found at a motel with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the head.

A woman watched horrified early Saturday morning as her brother-in-law calmly stood inside an apartment doorway and shot her sister, then delivered a second shot from just two feet away as he stood over the fallen victim, she said.

“I thought it was like a dream,” said Anya Mikasobe about the confrontation in which 29-year-old Norma Ofiu of La Mirada was killed. “Before he shot her, Norma screamed, ‘Anya, help! Anya!’ ”

After killing her sister, the man then turned the gun on her, Mikasobe said.

“I started jumping around,” said Mikasobe, 30. “I thought he was going to shoot me. Then he turned toward the door and walked out. He didn’t even run.

“I went to my sister. She was breathing and looking up. She looked like she was alive. I called 911 and said, ‘Somebody shot my sister! Send the paramedics!’ ” Norma Ofiu was taken to Martin Luther Hospital in Anaheim, where she was pronounced dead on arrival at 5:35 a.m.

During the killing, Mikasobe’s 13-year-old daughter was in another room of the second-story apartment.

Through witnesses’ descriptions of his car, police said, they traced the suspect, Lopeti Siliva Ofiu, 26, of Fontana, from the apartment in the 300 block of West Valencia Drive to the Quality Inn in the 7000 block of Beach Boulevard in Buena Park, six miles away.

After confirming that he was registered, police decided to try to reach him by phone. But before they could, they heard gunshots from inside his room.

Fullerton Police Lt. Al Burks said a few hotel guests in surrounding rooms were evacuated and a Buena Park SWAT team was called. When they broke into the room, they found Ofiu inside with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the head. He was in critical condition Saturday night at UCI Medical Center in Orange.

Mikasobe, who said her sister had been involved in a troubled five-year marriage and had been separated for about two months, said the tragedy began about 4 a.m., shortly after she and her sister returned from a night out. She said Norma Ofiu was visiting her and had decided to spend the night.

She said her sister was awakened by loud banging on the front door, but Mikasobe said she told her sister not to open it. Minutes later, Mikasobe said, she went to use the bathroom and looked through a crack in the door, which opens to the front room. She saw Norma standing in front of the closed door. She said she thought the banging had ceased.

Then, “I heard her scream. . . . I heard the gunshot. She was already lying on the floor when he put the gun two feet away (from Norma’s) head and shot her again. She could have been dead from the first one.”

Bertha Gonzalez, 30, who lives in the apartment under Mikasobe’s, said she was watching television when she saw someone climb the stairs and heard the knocking.

“I heard a shot, and then I heard a second one, real muffled,” Gonzalez said. “I heard somebody cry, and somebody fall. It sounded like a window had broken.”

She said her husband later heard somebody come down the steps.

“I was afraid to look out the window,” she said.

Jose Ordaz, a front desk clerk at the Quality Inn, said Ofiu had been registered at the hotel since Thursday. The hotel’s acting general manager, Larry Fisher, said Ofiu had done nothing suspicious.

Ordaz said that shortly after he reported for work at 7 a.m., a number of police arrived asking questions about the owner of a Toyota. He said he believed the car had temporary California license plates.

The clerk estimated that eight or nine guests were asked to leave their rooms for about two hours during the incident.

Mikasobe, who had returned to the apartment by Saturday evening, said her sister’s three children were not with her when she was killed. Two of them, boys ages 3 and 4, are deaf. She said her sister’s daughter is 7 years old.