Police Defend Response in 2 Slayings : Time: Officers acted with appropriate speed considering the need for caution, an internal investigation of Elgar incident finds.

San Diego police took six minutes to respond to the scene of last week’s shooting at a Miramar electronics company but waited seven minutes more before entering the building as they tried to glean information about the shootings from fleeing employees, according to an internal investigation concluded Monday.

“Based on everything we looked at--and that included listening to 911 tapes and talking to officers--we have concluded that there was not an unnecessary delay in police response,” said Lt. Bill Brown of the department’s inspection and control unit.

The systematic shootings by Larry T. Hansel, a disgruntled former employee of Elgar Corp., one week ago left two electronics executives dead and prompted the company’s president to angrily criticize police who were called to the scene.

One of the executives, John Jones, died at the scene. Michael Krowitz, a regional sales manager, died in surgery at Scripps Memorial Hospital.

Based on the complaints of company president Bill Humphreys, who said it took 27 minutes for police to arrive after his employees called 911, City Manager Jack McGrory ordered an investigation into the police response.

Humphreys, who could not be reached for comment, is scheduled to meet with McGrory and Police Chief Bob Burgreen today to discuss the department’s findings.

“He wants to reconcile this in a meeting face to face,” Elgar spokeswoman Catherine Wambach said. “He just wants to understand this fully.”

Results of the weeklong internal investigation show that 911 communications dispatchers got the first call about the shooting at 2:24 p.m. and relayed the information to a police dispatcher. Twenty more calls came in from four addresses in the area, making it unclear to police exactly where the shooting had occurred, Brown said.

Two cars were dispatched to the area at 2:27 p.m., and the first arrived at 2:30 p.m., stopping at the intersection of Brown Deer Road and Carroll Road. The second arrived at 2:34 p.m.

In the four minutes it took the second car to arrive, officers talked to employees who had been running out of the building to determine where the shooting had taken place. It was unclear whether the gunman was still inside, the investigation showed.

“We were contacting people to find out if we had the correct address, to find out if the suspect was inside, to find out who was injured and to get proper assistance,” Brown said. “If the man was still inside shooting, we wouldn’t be rushing inside.”

At 2:34 p.m., two police cars drove up the hill to Elgar’s headquarters at 9250 Brown Deer Road. A third car stayed below and set up a command post. Officers again quizzed frantic workers who were streaming out of Elgar’s front doors and learned that Hansel was no longer in the building.

They entered the building at 2:37, 13 minutes after the first call came in and 10 minutes after the first police cars were dispatched to the scene, Brown said.

In criticizing police, Humphreys said someone from his office called 911 at 2:20 p.m. The company president said he walked out onto the building’s roof, saw one police car down at the bottom of the hill, and ran back to the phone to place a second call at 2:40 p.m. He said he ordered the operator to “log when these calls were made. I want you to mark when these calls were made.”

Among the answers that investigators do not have is exactly when Hansel left the building and rode off on a mountain bike.

“It was sometime between 2:30 p.m. and 2:37 p.m.,” Brown said. “We have not been able to pin that down exactly.”