Man Kills 2 Children, Self on Father’s Day : Crime: He had a history of drinking, drug use and domestic violence, witnesses and court papers say.

Just before firing one bullet each into the heads of his two small children and then killing himself in his Simi Valley garage on Father’s Day, Larry Sasse opened the overhead door.

His roommates reason that Sasse wanted his wife, Debra--who had filed for divorce because of his alleged attacks and drug abuse--to see what had happened to her family.

He got what he wanted, Debra Sasse said Monday.

Moments after learning of the shootings Sunday night, she sped to his house, jumped from her car and rushed up to the yellow police tape skirting the garage.

“The police tried to stop me. They said that I didn’t want to see, that he had killed my kids,” Sasse said, her eyes wet and distant. “But I saw them.”

There lay the bodies of Breanna, 4, Michael, 3, and Sasse, 31, all that was left of more than a year of what Debra Sasse and court documents call her husband’s methamphetamine-fueled paranoia, death threats and rage.

The carnage came just days before Larry Sasse was to be served with a three-year restraining order keeping him from his wife and her parents, she said.

When Larry Sasse and Debra Forrester married and settled in Arizona nearly six years ago, he did not drink as much. In the months before he killed his children, his wife said, he was putting away up to a 12-pack of beer daily.

After the couple moved into Debra’s parents’ home in Simi Valley two years ago so Sasse could work in a new job at a Wilmington refinery, he got worse, his wife said.

He drank more heavily, admitted using methamphetamine and began assaulting family members, according to divorce papers.

Sasse also became increasingly paranoid--convinced there were cops in the bushes, electronic bugs in his bed and men on the roof of every house in the neighborhood watching him, the documents said.

On Christmas, he shoved furniture against his bedroom door, barricading himself for the whole day. He stayed there, the papers say, drinking heavily.

When Debra confronted him, he showed her the drugs he had been using and flushed them down the toilet so she could not report him to police, the divorce papers say. Then he promised to get help only if she would keep the marriage together.

But the threats and the drug use continued, she said. And one night in February, she awoke with him straddling her chest, gripping her throat and threatening, “Don’t make a sound or I’ll snap your neck.”

The next day, she called police and he moved out.

A 20-day temporary restraining order was not enough to stop Sasse from making more telephone threats, court papers said, including one that he made to Debra on Feb. 19: “I am going to kill your entire family.”

Three days later, Sasse--apparently on drugs--barged into the Forresters’ home, knocking people over, according to court papers. He barricaded himself, Breanna and Michael in the children’s room, emerging only after police arrived to escort him off the property, the papers say.

A few weeks later, Debra, 29, a pharmacy technician at Simi Valley Hospital, filed for divorce.

“He was living out of his car and calling here numerous times,” said Debra’s father, Dan Forrester.

Debra Sasse added: “He was saying, ‘You’d better come back to me or you’ll pay.’ It was always, ‘I didn’t do anything, why’d you do this to me?’ ”

And although he won partial custody of Breanna and Michael--entitling him to weekends and Wednesday evenings--he often refused to see them if he could not see Debra, she said.

Police had tapped their phones, trying to build a case against him for making terroristic threats, the Forresters said.

That investigation was still going on the night of the shootings, said Simi Valley Police Lt. Anthony Harper.

That evening, Sasse was to have returned his children to his wife in front of the police station. He never arrived, she said.

As she stood at the front desk, she heard a dispatcher’s radio call reporting shots fired on Delilah Street.

She said she raced to the house just blocks away to find that he had carried out one of his most frequent promises: “He kept threatening to leave with the kids.”

Correspondent J. E. Mitchell contributed to this report.