AIDS Patient Holds Police at Bay, Kills Self : Suicide: The hospice resident fired at a helicopter and officers before taking his life. The incident revives debate over having the treatment facility in Mid-City neighborhood.

An AIDS patient living at a Mid-City hospice exchanged shots with police and held officers at bay for more than three hours Tuesday before taking his life with a single shot to his head, authorities said.

The incident left many residents in the ethnically diverse neighborhood near 12th Avenue and Venice Boulevard terrified and reopened a festering debate among supporters and opponents of the hospice, called Casa de Nuestra Senora.

Police said the 34-year-old patient, whose name was not released pending notification of relatives, was scheduled to go to another medical facility to receive medication for a psychiatric condition about 2:30 p.m. when he became enraged, pulled a 9-millimeter handgun and fired one shot at a female staffer.

About half a dozen people in the two-story house in the 1400 block of 12th Avenue ran out when the shot was fired, officers said. The gunman later ran outside and fired at a police helicopter that was hovering overhead, residents said.

“He shot three times at the helicopter--bam, bam, bam,” said Oscar Francis, 31. “The helicopter was real high and when the pilot came back, the man fired a couple of times again.”

Police arrived in force, sealed off the block and evacuated about 30 homes, officers said.

The gunman allegedly fired at officers on the ground who returned fire, police said.

A SWAT team fired 18 rounds of tear gas into the house about 6 p.m., waited 20 minutes and prepared to storm the house, police said. Before they could enter, they heard what they described as a muffled gunshot.

The gunman was found lying face down in his bed in a back bedroom upstairs, Lt. Victor Guzman said. He was pronounced dead at the scene of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, police said.

Guzman said hospice staffers had planned to take the man “to get some medical assistance for his condition. In the last couple of days he was having some psychological problems. What this had to do with it we don’t know yet.”

Peter McDermott, one of the hospice’s coordinators, said the dead man was the first “deteriorating AIDS patient with mental problems out of the 20 to 22 patients who have gone through this hospice in the last couple of years.”

“We feel very saddened by the fact that one of our clients wanted to take this direction,” he said. “We try to provide a compassionate home life to someone suffering from AIDS.

“No one on the staff was hurt. None of the others (patients) were hurt. We’re glad of that.”

John Maceri, executive director of Homestead Hospice & Shelter in the San Fernando Valley, said he had “never heard of anything like (Tuesday’s shooting) happening at a hospice before.”

In advanced stages of acquired immuned deficiency syndrome, “dementia is very common,” he said. “But in such a weakened condition, the patient isn’t even ambulatory.”

Usually, he said, the dementia seems similar to symptoms common in Alzheimer’s disease, where the patient suffers confusion and memory loss--not rage.

Neighborhood residents had circulated petitions protesting the opening of the hospice in June, 1988. It is owned by Serra Ancillary Care Corp., a joint venture of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles and major Catholic hospitals in the area. The facility has six beds, according to a registry of local AIDS hospices.

One neighbor, Janet Sunsdahl, 38, said the shooting was the first time that there had been any trouble at the house.

“If you didn’t know what the place was, you never would have known what was going on,” she said.

She said she knew that one group of area residents circulated a petition opposing the hospice, and another group collected signatures supporting it. The opponents, Sunsdahl said, “didn’t want AIDS people in here so close to us. They knocked on my door, but I didn’t feel like signing it.

“I feel like everybody should have a chance at living,” she said. “But now with this, we’re really going to see a change in this neighborhood. Now we’ll have to address the problems about this AIDS house on our street.”

The changes that Sunsdahl fears apparently have begun.

“We don’t like them here,” said neighborhood resident Jay Hong, 36. “No one wanted this house in our area. But City Hall OKs it, and here they come. We’ve been very scared of them. They start crying at one, two, three o’clock in the morning. They cry real loud.

“They wake us up. We were very happy before they came here. Now I’m trying to move because they’re here.”

Some neighbors expressed fear that they or their children could become infected by the hospice residents.

Yolanda Vidal, 36, who lives across the street, called the AIDS patients “lovely people.”

She said each morning when she leaves for work, “they always have a nice hello. They didn’t bother anybody. You’re not going to get sick just talking to them. You can’t get AIDS from just saying hello.”

Times staff writers Laurie Becklund, Edward J. Boyer, Stephen Braun and John H. Lee contributed to this story.