Relatives Struggle to Cope : With Pair of Violent Deaths Tragedy: Woman with Down’s syndrome, grandmother dead in apparent murder-suicide.

Relatives of a 28-year-old woman with Down’s syndrome who was shot to death by her grandmother this week in an apparent murder-suicide tried Thursday to understand the tragic events.

Family members at their Glendora home, where the deaths occurred, said 86-year-old Frances Racz was a bitter, moody person who had often talked about suicide. Racz shot herself twice with a small-caliber pistol after taking the life of her granddaughter, Allison Enderle, on Tuesday.

“She always said that when she went, she’d take Allison with her,” said Joan Enderle, Allison’s mother. But she said that family members never had taken such comments seriously.

Glendora detectives were as baffled as the family about Racz’s motives, speculating that the woman was pessimistic about Allison’s future.

“In my opinion, she did not want Allison to go through life as miserably as she did,” said Sgt. Tim Pfeiffer.

Racz had lived with her daughter and granddaughter since the girl was 1, helping to care for her. Though the young woman had experienced increasing difficulties with rheumatoid arthritis in recent years, she was not solely reliant on her grandmother to take care of her, the mother said.

Both Joan Enderle and her son, Wayne, 32, a plumbing salesman from Riverside, were committed to caring for Allison, Enderle said.

Joan Enderle, 62, a retired waitress, sat despondently next to a tabletop Christmas tree as she recounted what had happened on Tuesday. A plastic Santa Claus still guarded the front door of the tan-and-white house where the three women had lived for six years.

She got up late on that rainy morning, Enderle said, and was fixing herself a cup of tea in the kitchen. “My mother had just said, ‘I feel sick today, and I’m not going to do anything,’ ” she said. “She’d do that periodically, then a few hours later she’d be up and piddling around.”

Suddenly Enderle heard a shot. “I wasn’t even sure if it was a shot,” she said. “I’d never heard one before.”

She ran to her daughter’s bedroom and found Allison, apparently dead in her bed. “She (Racz) had shot her right here,” Enderle said, pointing to her chest.

As Enderle tried to help her daughter, the grandmother sat on the bed next to her and fired a shot into her own chest, apparently without damaging any vital organs.

The grandmother then stood up, said, “This isn’t working” and retreated to her own bedroom and locked the door. A few moments later, Enderle heard another shot. According to police, the older woman, having only loaded two bullets in her .22-caliber handgun, apparently reloaded and shot herself in the head.

Racz died later that day at San Dimas Community Hospital.

The gun was registered to Racz, Pfeiffer said.

“She got it years and years ago when we used to make trips to the Colorado River,” said Enderle, whose husband died in 1987. “It was a little thing, like a toy. To my knowledge, she never fired it. My brother (had) said, ‘I don’t think she could shoot spit with that.’ ”

Enderle and her son described Allison as a happy young woman who had made a good adjustment to Down’s syndrome, a congenital disease that causes mental retardation.

“She was a delightful, happy child,” Enderle said.

Racz, on the other hand, was moody, though meticulous about caring for herself and staying in good health, relatives said. “Some days, she’d be in a good mood, some days she’d be in a bad mood,” said Wayne Enderle. “She was a picture of contradictions, complaining about living but doing everything she could to live longer.”

Enderle said she was bitter about her mother. “When I heard that she was still alive in the hospital, I said, ‘Please, let the doctors save her so she can see what she’s done to me.’ But she died.”

Enderle sank deeper into the couch. “I can handle the grief,” she said. “It’s the hatred I have in me that I’m going to have to work on.”