Suspect Called Gentle, Hard-Working

If there were problems in Robert Earl Mack’s modest Los Angeles Place home, none of his closest neighbors in the tidy section of Valencia Park had any clue that they were related to the job he had held all of his adult life.

Mack’s girlfriend had recently moved out, one recalled, but she was back just about every day. Mack’s silver Cadillac, with its “RE MACK” vanity plates, had been parked out front more often in the past couple of weeks, another said, but Mack sometimes had time off from his job at the plant.

“That’s all I’ve ever known him to do is work and work and work and work and work,” said Sarah Head, Mack’s next-door neighbor in the Southeast San Diego neighborhood, who has known the family since before Mack was born 42 years ago. “He’d work overtime. Whenever they’d say work, he’d work.”

“I didn’t know he was laid off, to tell you the truth,” said Lloyd Hill, who lives across the street from Mack and chatted with him Thursday as Mack changed the battery in his car.

Mack had not let on that he had lost the job at the plant where he had worked since 1968, nor did he show any hint of the rage that would erupt at a grievance hearing Friday, when he allegedly pulled a handgun and shot two co-workers, killing one.

“Lord have mercy, the child must have went insane!” Head exclaimed when reporters told her of the shooting spree. “He must have lost his mind. He wasn’t that type of person. . . . He was gentle. He was mellow. He always had a smile on his face for everybody.”

A woman at Mack’s home, with its torn screen door and sparse lawn, said Mack had been “upset about his job.” She described herself as his girlfriend, but declined to identify herself or answer any other questions.

Mack, described as a divorced father of three grown children, was a small, gentle, pleasant man who had lived in the neighborhood for the past 15 or 20 years, Head said. After Mack’s divorce, Head took him home-cooked meals. When she injured her back, Mack let her use his hot tub to help her recuperate.

“He was always so supportive,” she said. “If I needed some money, or if I wanted something or if I got sick, I felt good because I knew he would always be there for me. I wasn’t afraid to stay in the neighborhood, because he was always here.”

Mack grew up and went to school nearby, Head said, and his widowed mother still dropped by frequently. Aside from bowling with a group of co-workers, she said, she knew of no other hobbies Mack had.

Not once had Mack shown signs of being upset, Head said, even as tension over layoffs at the General Dynamics’ Convair Division plant mounted, and Mack himself was thrown out of work for unsatisfactory attendance.

Just two days ago, she said, she and Mack exchanged their usual pleasantries as she came home.

“I said, ‘How’s it going?’ ” Head recalled. “He said, ‘OK, how’s it going with you?’

“I said, ‘Well, I’m just trying to make it.’ He said, ‘Yeah, me too.’ And he just walked in the house.”

“You must be talking about somebody else,” she told reporters on her doorstep. “You couldn’t be talking about Robert.”