Voices Told Him to Shoot Boss, Accused Says

A 22-year-old Oceanside man told sheriff’s detectives that voices in his head urged him to gun down his supervisor, according to a tape-recorded interview played in court Friday.

The jury trying Jose Luis Maldonado heard the first part of a two-hour interview between him and San Diego County Sheriff’s detectives just hours after he allegedly shot and killed one of his supervisors, Juan Lopez, last January in the parking lot of a San Marcos industrial park.

In the interview, Maldonado repeatedly said he did not remember shooting Lopez and that he did not have any disputes with either Lopez or Adrian Flores, another supervisor whom Maldonado is accused of attempting to murder.

“Do you always take the gun to work with you?” asked Sheriff’s Detective Stephen Algya on the tape.

“No,” Maldonado said.

“Why did you take it today?”

“I don’t know, protection.”

“Did somebody threaten you?” Algya asked.

“I just feel things,” Maldonado responded.

“What did you feel today?”

“Like my life is in danger.”

In the tape, Maldonado, who had worked at the orthopedic manufacturing firm for nine months before the Jan. 29 shooting, said he had taken the gun to work the day before the shooting as well. A previous witness had testified that Maldonado had taken the gun to work two or three weeks before the shooting.

“Ever since I started working there . . . I always had the feeling that something bad was going to happen there. Like a blind man, I can’t see anything, but I can feel it,” Maldonado said on the tape.

Just moments before the shooting, Maldonado said a voice in his head said “Watch out,” and it was then he pulled his gun out of his waistband and shot at Lopez.

The workers at the Professional Care Products in San Marcos had just finished a mid-morning break and were about to go back into the building when Maldonado allegedly, without saying a word, shot Lopez twice in the chest.

Witnesses said he then turned and fired once at Flores before returning to Lopez’s still body and shooting him twice in the back of the head.

Maldonado has entered a plea of not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity, meaning that, if the jury finds him guilty of the killing, it must then determine his sanity at the time.

Maldonado’s attorney, public defender John Jimenez, said the tape so far has helped his case.

However, Deputy Dist. Atty. Greg Walden said the rest of the interview, which will be played for the jury next week, will show Maldonado backing off from his statement that voices controlled him.

“He starts out saying, ‘Oh, I don’t remember anything,’ . . . but then he gets into saying, ‘Yeah, it was self-defense, I thought he was pulling a gun or a knife,’ ” Walden said outside the courtroom.

“Finally, he just says, ‘Yeah, I blew the guy away because he pissed me off,’ ” Walden said.

However, the motive for the shooting remains elusive, and neither Walden nor Jimenez would say what reason Maldonado had for shooting his supervisor.

Other witnesses have testified that no disagreement existed between the two and that, although Maldonado was going to be reprimanded for declining work performance, no one had told him.