The Oxnard Rampage : Winterbourne Had Owned Weapons for Years, Police Say

As Oxnard police buried a slain colleague Tuesday, investigators from four agencies continued to piece together inquiries into last week’s quadruple murder by a quiet, chronically unemployed computer engineer from Ventura.

Although it may be another month before a final report is complete, investigators revealed that they had answered two key questions about the bloodiest shooting spree in Ventura County history.

Alan Winterbourne, 33, had owned for years the two high-powered rifles, shotgun and revolver he took on a murderous attack on an Oxnard unemployment office, investigators said. And he had practiced his aim on bottles in the Ventura County back country.

“He didn’t go out and purchase those that day or that week; he’s had them for some time,” Ventura Police Lt. Brad Talbot said.

Authorities also said Tuesday that Winterbourne apparently had no history of mental illness or anti-depressant drug use before killing four people and wounding four more last week.

“He had no psychiatric history, no drug history,” said Dr. Fred Walker, assistant county medical examiner. “Evidently the young man had practically no medical history.”

Walker said Winterbourne’s mother, Ila, and their family doctor--Dr. Keith King of Oxnard-- told a coroner’s investigator that Winterbourne had suffered no psychiatric problems.

“He had a fracture of his jaw 30 years ago,” Walker said. “The strongest medicine he had taken in the past was aspirin--that’s what his mother said.”

Those findings, especially the fact that Winterbourne purchased his .44-caliber handgun in the mid-1980s--led authorities to discount theories that the distraught man’s final deadly fury was prompted by a single recent event.

It is much more likely that Winterbourne, unemployed for almost eight years, had become progressively upset about his joblessness and simply decided one morning that he could not cope any more, they said.

“That was a question: Did something push him over the edge in the last days?” Oxnard Police Cmdr. Tom Cady said. “So this doesn’t help us in clarifying his (immediate) motive.”

Winterbourne indicated his motivation by stopping by a local newspaper and dropping off stacks of letters documenting his futile job search just 20 minutes before he started shooting people in Oxnard. His attack came almost exactly seven years after he lost an appeal of an unemployment claim.

But investigators said they have located no one to whom Winterbourne confided his intentions, and the assailant’s precise motive remains the principal question left in the investigation.

“Someone said, ‘Why can’t you just draw a conclusion?’ ” Cady said. “But there could be some factor that we’re not aware of. . . . We owe it to the public and those involved to go through the process.”

The primary focus of the three concurrent investigations by Oxnard and Ventura detectives and sheriff’s deputies are the details of shootings at separate scenes: the state Employment Development Department on C Street in Oxnard, where Winterbourne killed three people and wounded four; a Victoria Avenue intersection, where Oxnard Detective James E. O’Brien was killed after a chase; and the unemployment office in Ventura, where Winterbourne was shot and killed by officers.

The departments will report their findings in a single report to the district attorney’s office, officials said. After examining those findings, Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury will release his own report on the series of events that led to Winterbourne’s death by police officers.

Top officers from the three departments said Tuesday that their investigations have produced no surprises so far.

“Nothing of any significance has caused us any alarm at all,” Ventura Lt. Talbot said.

Cady and Sheriff’s Lt. Craig Husband said that Oxnard officers responded by the book when confronting Winterbourne at the unemployment office and later in the showdown on Victoria Avenue where O’Brien was killed.

Cady said that the four officers who encountered Winterbourne when he fled the unemployment office did what they could to stop him.

“I don’t see anything that would say our people didn’t do the best job they could,” he said. “They risked their lives to try to take this guy into custody.”

At the corner of Victoria Avenue and Olivas Park Road, where Winterbourne was stalled in traffic, O’Brien and his colleagues spaced their patrol cars perfectly and drew cover behind them as trained, Husband said.

“Jim followed the utmost officer safety survival procedures. All the officers did everything right,” he said. “But (Winterbourne) had the weapon with the scoped rifle.”

Using a scope on a .300-magnum rifle, Winterbourne shot through a crease between the open door and the car frame, striking the officer in the head, Husband said.

Winterbourne was not a hunter, nor had he practiced at a local shooting range, Ventura’s Talbot said. But investigators have found that “he would do some target practice in the hills around Ventura. And some investigators said he would occasionally go out to the back country and shoot at cans and bottles, but not with any degree of frequency.”

Yet Winterbourne accumulated a 12-gauge shotgun and a semiautomatic rifle in addition to his revolver and powerful hunting rifle, Talbot said.

Records show that Winterbourne bought the revolver about 1985. Traces have not been completed on the rifles, but the condition of gun cases indicates that Winterbourne had them for a long time, Talbot said.

“I don’t have any idea why,” he said. “Lots of Americans have weapons.”

Talbot said he had heard nothing to indicate that Winterbourne planned to use those weapons in the days before his assault last Thursday.

“To the contrary. Everybody we talked to said it was pretty much a surprise,” he said.

Meanwhile, medical examiner Walker said an autopsy shows that Winterbourne was shot 11 times. “From head to toe is literally correct,” he said. “The chief fatal wound was in the head.”

Although there were no needle marks or signs of drug use on Winterbourne’s body, Walker said toxicological tests for drugs and alcohol are being done and will not be complete for weeks.

A coroner’s examination of O’Brien’s body produced enough bullet fragments to enable criminologists to match them with Winterbourne’s rifle, the doctor said.