Slaying Suspect Kills Himself in Stanton Motel

An unemployed parolee, suspected of shooting to death a Santa Fe Springs computer sales clerk in a videotaped robbery earlier this week, killed himself on Wednesday during a five-hour standoff with police at a Stanton motel, authorities said.

An Orange County SWAT team found Mark Anthony Murphy, 24, dead from a gunshot wound to the head after bursting into his motel room in the early afternoon, authorities said.

Murphy, who spent much of his childhood in Orange County, was paroled in September after a string of local convictions and was also wanted in the shooting of a childhood friend in Anaheim last month.

Early Wednesday, nearly 50 police and SWAT members from Los Angeles and Orange counties surrounded the Golden West Motel on Beach Boulevard after receiving a tip late Tuesday night from a television viewer who apparently recognized Murphy on a newscast showing a videotape of that day’s robbery and slaying. The tipster said Murphy had been staying at the motel.

By 8 a.m. Wednesday, police had evacuated the two-story motel and contacted Murphy in Room 212 on the motel phone, demanding that he surrender, Orange County Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Dan Martini said.

Murphy ignored repeated calls and instead disconnected the phone line, police said. By the time the SWAT team stormed the room at about 1:30 p.m., Murphy was dead.

Earlier on Wednesday, Stanley Perryman, 25, of Stanton, who is believed to have driven the getaway car used in the Santa Fe Springs slaying, turned himself in to Buena Park police after viewing the videotape on television, authorities said. He was being held without bail in Norwalk on suspicion of murder.

Investigators believe that Murphy did the shooting.

On Tuesday, Murphy had posed as a customer at Dynamic Computers in Santa Fe Springs, authorities said. When a store clerk, Hyman Wiener, 56, rang up a sale of a keyboard extension cord, Murphy pulled out a handgun from his waistband and fatally shot Wiener before fleeing with a handful of computer equipment, police said.

Police said they were shocked by the senselessness of the crime.

“It was a despicable, cold-blooded murder. He shot the guy when his back was turned to him. As he was walking out the door, it looked like he was smiling, carrying the computer equipment out the door,” said Sgt. Ron Spear of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

The incident was captured on the store’s security video camera.

At the Sheriff’s Department’s request, several local television stations aired parts of the footage on their 11 p.m. news broadcasts, showing the suspected assailant calmly ripping computer equipment out of the walls just moments after he shot the clerk.

The publicity quickly paid off: About 11:20 p.m., a viewer reported that the man seen in the videotape was at the Stanton motel, police said.

The tipster was not the only person who recognized Murphy.

The suspect’s mother, Gail Jenkins, 46, of Buena Park, said a friend of the family called her house about 11 p.m. Tuesday and said that Murphy was on television. She ran to turn on the set.

“I just about died,” she said in an interview. “I couldn’t believe it. I was half-asleep. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was up all night, worrying.”

Jenkins said her son went to high school in Buena Park but dropped out after the ninth grade. He worked as a mover through the years but, finding the work too hard and the pay too low, soon turned to small-time crime and drugs, she said. Jenkins said she believes he tried to rob the computer store as a way of getting enough money to move out of the state.

Murphy was on parole after a string of convictions for auto theft, assault and burglary, and he was also wanted by Anaheim police.

Anaheim Police Sgt. Steve Rodig said Murphy was suspected of shooting a man repeatedly on April 19 in a strip mall parking lot at Lincoln Avenue and Dale Street. Rodig declined to give the name of the victim, who survived the attack.

Rodig said his department had been preparing to ask for a warrant for Murphy’s arrest in connection with the Anaheim shooting.

Police refused to divulge details of the shooting, but Michelle Cotney, the former girlfriend of Murphy and the mother of his 10-month-old son, said the incident grew out of “kind of like a love triangle between me, him and someone else” who got shot. Murphy’s mother said the man who got shot was his best friend from childhood.

Hours before the SWAT team entered Murphy’s room, Cotney stood anxiously at a pay phone across the street from the motel, just beyond the knot of curious bystanders and television cameras.

Cotney, 24, who lives in Anaheim, said she had just paged Murphy on his beeper, and was hoping he would call her from inside the motel.

Cotney said Murphy was a good man and a hard worker before his addiction to amphetamine overwhelmed him.

The drug, she believes, led him to kill. “He has done bad, but it’s not him. It’s the drugs talking,” she said.

Cotney shook her head and said, “I just hope he’s not dead.”

But he may well have been.

While authorities did not know for certain when Murphy shot himself, police said they heard a single gunshot early in the standoff. Police waited several hours before entering the room because they detected movement at the window and considered Murphy dangerous, they said.

Just before storming the motel room, SWAT members--armed with automatic rifles and shotguns--smashed the window and tossed inside a smoke bomb. They then discovered the body.

But Murphy’s death did little to mollify those who knew the slain store clerk.

Long Beach resident Deborah Wren, a next-door neighbor of Hyman Wiener who is in her late 30s, said his death came as a “shock. . . . I’m in disbelief.”

Wren, who said she grew up with the three children of Hyman and Joanna Wiener, said Murphy’s suicide “doesn’t take the bullet back that killed my neighbor.”

“I can’t comprehend anybody that can kill,” she said. “It’s the worse thing you can do--life is so precious.”

She described Hyman Wiener as a wonderful person who thought nothing of getting up from the dinner table to help his neighbors connect a VCR. Ironically, she said, it was his penchant for electronics, particularly computers, that became “the hobby that killed him.”

Retired from management at GTE about six years ago, Wiener made computers his life, which took him to Dynamic Computers, Wren said.

Wiener is survived by his wife, three grown children and three grandchildren, Wren said.

Wren’s 18-year-old son, Steven, said, “This kind of makes you wonder what the world’s coming to.”

Times staff photographer Mark Boster and staff writer Davan Maharaj contributed to this report.