Convair Slayer Plea-Bargains, Gets Life Term : Crime: Fired General Dynamics worker pleads guilty in a deal negotiated the day his second trial was to begin.

Fired General Dynamics worker Robert Earl Mack pleaded guilty Monday to second-degree murder and premeditated attempted murder in a plea bargain negotiated the day his second trial was scheduled to begin.

“Sorry this whole thing had to happen this way,” an emotionless Mack told the judge.

Mack did not elaborate, but his attorney said later that Mack was apologizing to the victims and their families for the pain he caused them after a shooting rampage Jan. 24 at General Dynamics’ Convair Division plant at Lindbergh Field.

“Mr. Mack is having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that he’s always maintained that he doesn’t know what happened,” defense attorney Michael Roake said.

After a jury deadlocked in his first trial, Mack was facing a retrial on charges of murdering company labor negotiator Michael Konz, 25, and attempting to murder his former supervisor, James T. English, 52. Both men were shot in the back of the head.

Though Mack, 43, pleaded guilty Monday, he still insists that he has no recollection of the shootings, Roake said.

“He’s not admitting any guilt that he felt personally, but rather that the evidence against him really was so overwhelming that it would have been difficult for (a trial) to turn out any other way,” Roake said.

On the day the jury in his retrial was expecting to hear opening statements, Mack entered into a plea bargain that will bring him one life sentence and a consecutive sentence of 15 years to life.

Superior Court Judge Richard Murphy will sentence Mack on Dec. 3. The judge told Mack that he will become eligible for parole in 17 years, but more than one year will be trimmed from this figure because of the time he has already spent in County Jail.

During his first trial in July, Mack testified that the shootings took place when he blacked out after a grievance hearing he had requested after he was terminated from his longtime job at the aerospace firm. Mack said he brought a gun to the meeting because he was planning to kill himself to make a statement to corporate America.

General Dynamics said he was fired because he was habitually late and had several unexplained absences from his post on the cruise missile assembly line.

Mack testified that while he was methodically hunting down Konz and English, he hallucinated he was riding a “big, black cat,” and imagined that he was in the Wild West when he later took refuge in another office.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Sickels on Monday labeled Mack’s story “hocus-pocus.” Sickels said he believes that Mack was aware of what he was doing when he pulled out a recently purchased handgun and shot the two company officials.

Roake called the case “an American tragedy.”

During the first trial, he portrayed Mack as a union worker devoted to General Dynamics who dreamed of being a high-ranking company official. In presenting evidence to the jury, Roake tried to demonstrate that Mack was the victim of an unfair attendance policy that was not uniformly enforced.

The jury in the first trial deadlocked, 6-6, on the charge of first-degree murder. Because of this and the 8-4 split in favor of guilt in the attempted murder count, a mistrial was declared July 24.

After they were unable to persuade 12 people of Mack’s guilt in the first trial, prosecutors were planning to use a different strategy this time by presenting evidence that Mack was a habitual cocaine user.

“I think he obviously was a good employee at General Dynamics for a number of years, but I think that went sour over the last 12 months or so because of his change of habits and I think that’s what brought this all on,” Sickels said, referring to his charge that Mack was a chronic cocaine user.

“I think that is what caused him to be late at work, miss so much at work, not having sufficient funds to carry on his lifestyle. I think cocaine was the reason for that.”

Sickels said it was a strategy decision not to introduce evidence of cocaine use during the first trial. “I thought that showing him to have a completely clear mind going down there with a loaded gun” would have been more likely to lead to a first-degree murder conviction, he said.

This time, the prosecution also intended to call James English to the witness stand.

Because of his severe injuries, English was not able to testify at the first trial. However, Murphy had ruled that he was competent to testify in the upcoming proceedings, even though he had no memory of the attack.

If English had testified, Sickels said, he would have “put to rest” Mack’s allegations that he was unfairly treated by his supervisor.

The victims’ families consented to the plea bargain, Sickels said. Several family members attended the proceedings Monday but refused to comment.

While the district attorney’s office originally sought a penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole, a Superior Court judge ruled in May that a special circumstance of lying in wait did not apply in the case.

Left with the charges of first-degree murder and “willful, deliberate and premeditated” attempted murder, the maximum sentence that Mack could have received was one life sentence and another term of 30 years to life in prison.

Prosecutors offered Mack a plea bargain two months ago that would have given him a sentence of 26 years to life. If Mack had accepted this deal, he would have been eligible for parole in about 16 years.

“I think it’s an acceptable resolution to the case,” Sickels said of the agreement.