Deputies Describe Chaos After Woman’s Slaying at Courthouse

Moments after her father fatally shot her mother in the Los Angeles Civil Courts building, a sobbing 6-year-old girl told sheriff’s deputies: “Mommy and daddy were talking, and mommy said something daddy didn’t like, so he shot her,” a deputy testified in Van Nuys on Tuesday.

Harry Zelig then approached deputies standing by his dying wife and calmly said: “I’m here. I did it,” Deputy Jim Kinney of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department testified at Zelig’s preliminary hearing.

Zelig, a Woodland Hills physician, was ordered held without bail on a murder charge in the Sept. 1, 1995, shooting of his ex-wife Eileen, 40, after a contentious child support hearing.

The Zeligs had fought a bitter divorce battle, and in court papers Eileen Zelig stated she feared that her husband wanted to harm her.

The deputies who testified Tuesday described the chaos in the Downtown Los Angeles Civil Courts Building moments after the shooting in a second-floor hallway.

“I heard screaming, but I heard a real scream, a terrifying scream,” testified Deputy Sylvia Myers, who had been in a courtroom near the shooting. “I just ran toward the scream and it was a little girl. . . . She was crying. She said, ‘My dad shot my mommy.’ ”

The girl was the Zeligs’ 6-year-old daughter, Lisa.

On the floor behind her was her mother, bleeding.

“My husband shot me,” Myers quoted her as saying.