Gunman Wounds 3 at Hughes Plant

A former employee stormed into a Hughes Electronics complex in El Segundo on Wednesday morning, shooting three people--seriously wounding one--and taking a hostage before surrendering to police in a parking lot, authorities said.

After an hourlong siege, Walter Waddy, 62, of Compton, a 16-year Hughes employee, was booked on suspicion of attempted murder and held without bail at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center’s jail ward, complaining of neck pains.

Investigators gave this account:

Waddy, wearing glasses, a neck brace and a brown leather jacket, arrived at the sprawling suburban operation about 9:10 a.m. Wednesday and parked in a reserved slot, intent on talking to someone about “his benefits.”

Spotting Tony Rojas, 41, a passerby, Waddy asked him if he worked there. When Rojas said that he did, Waddy shot him in the left shoulder.

Waddy then walked into a small outbuilding, where Phillip Gonzales, 55, of San Pedro was seated behind a desk. Waddy shot Gonzales in the hip.

The gunman then walked into the two-story, red brick building that houses Hughes Space and Communications Co. offices. There, an unarmed guard, Ramon “Rudy” Ramirez, 60, challenged him.

The guard “asked [Waddy] for some ID and his ID was his gun,” Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Raymond H. Peavy said.

Waddy shot Ramirez in the chest, detectives said. They said the gunman then went to a second-floor office, where he took a male hostage and fired a shot into a wall, telling shaken Hughes workers that they should call the police.

El Segundo police already had arrived when Waddy marched the hostage from the building about 10:25 a.m. They ordered the suspect to drop the gun, release the hostage and lie down. He complied, El Segundo Police Capt. Ron Green said.

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Rojas was listed in fair condition at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center after surgeons removed a bullet that had entered his shoulder and lodged just under the skin in his back.

Gonzales was listed in stable condition Wednesday night after surgery at Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne.

Ramirez, a Cerritos resident and an employee of Pinkerton Security & Investigation Services, was listed in serious condition at UCLA Medical Center on Wednesday night after two hours of emergency surgery for a gunshot wound to the lower right chest.

In the aftermath of the shootings, witnesses tried to piece together just what had happened.

Maintenance worker Saul Reyes, 18, said he had just gone into a men’s restroom near the office building’s entrance when a shot was fired a few feet away.

“I came out and saw the security guard lying down,” Reyes said. “He was bleeding, talking on his radio.”

Reyes said he heard only one shot but saw two shell casings on the ground. He and other employees said the telephone line to the phone at the security desk appeared to have been cut.

“I saw the line was cut,” he said. “I picked up the phone [to call for help] and it was dead.”

Reyes said the wounded security guard had arrived just minutes before to relieve a female guard who needed to take a short break.

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Hyesook Choi, a mechanical designer, said she was working in the company’s design lab with about a dozen other employees when the gunman came through the door.

“The guy said, ‘Duck your head! I’m not kidding!’ I looked and I saw the gun,” said a shaken Choi. “He kept yelling, ‘I’m not kidding! I’m not kidding!’ ”

Choi said she dropped to the floor and began crawling out of the room behind another designer. She said she and several others from the lab had made their way into other offices when “I heard gunfire.” Then they continued outside.

After the suspect grabbed a hostage, he told shaken Hughes workers that they should call the police, witnesses said.

“After he had shot those people and taken the hostage . . . he allegedly made a statement that somebody better call the police and pick those bodies up,” Peavy said.

Hughes representatives said Waddy was hired by the company’s Radar and Communications Systems Division as a components tests technician, or electronic parts assembler, in 1977. He resigned the company in 1993 for “medical and personal reasons,” said Hughes communications director Don O’Neal.

Neither the company spokesman nor authorities were able to shed light on a motive for the shooting or Waddy’s medical problems.

Although the radar offices have since been moved to a nearby building, at the time Waddy worked for the company “they occupied much of the building where the shootings occurred,” O’Neal said.

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Waddy’s Compton neighbors were stunned to learn that he was the man they had heard about on the afternoon news.

Eddie Stewart, who lives two doors from the Waddys on Clymar Avenue, let out a low moan when he heard that Waddy, whom he calls Pop, was arrested. “Oh, no. Oh, God. Oooh,” he moaned. “I can’t believe it. He’s a great person.”

Stewart, who has known Waddy for nearly 34 years, immediately walked out his front door and down to the Waddy home, a neatly tended two-story, ranch-style house the Waddys bought in 1964.

Stewart emerged a few minutes later after talking to Waddy’s wife, saying she was “shaken.” The last time she saw her husband, Stewart said, was about 8 a.m. when he told her he was going to change the oil on his Chevy Impala, an older car in mint condition.

Other neighbors up and down the street repeatedly expressed bewilderment over the shooting. “I didn’t know he even had it in him,” said Leo Barnett, 73, who for 32 years lived six doors from the Waddys.

Waddy was known as a bit of a hermit who stayed to himself and puttered around his garden. He and his wife, who used to work in a hospital, have one daughter, Patricia.

Joyce Dorsey, 59, who lived two doors from the family, remembered Waddy as a doting father who spent a lot of time with his only child.

“Years ago when you saw him with his daughter, you’d sit back and say, ‘Gee, I wish my husband would take that much time with the kids,’ ” Dorsey said.

Neighbors said that Waddy constantly wore a neck brace but that no one asked him about it.

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By midmorning, hundreds of dazed Hughes employees had crowded around a company pickup truck in the center of one parking lot.

Entrances and exits to the facility, at Sepulveda Boulevard and Imperial Highway, were closed, and dozens of security guards roamed the grounds and enforced blockades. Employees were asked to stay on the grounds.

Later, the company canceled its second shift.

Chong Lee, a neighbor of Ramirez, described the guard as a “nice guy, very quiet. A real family man.” Lee said Ramirez worked for the Internal Revenue Service before getting a job as a security guard. Pinkerton said Ramirez had worked for the company since 1988.

Hughes Space and Communications is one of the most successful divisions of Hughes Electronics Corp., the Los Angeles-based aerospace and electronics subsidiary of General Motors Corp. The division is the world’s largest producer of commercial satellites, many of which are used for global telecommunications.

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Hughes Electronics--with sales last year of $14.8 billion--overall has evolved in recent years from a bloated, slow-moving producer of mostly military equipment into a streamlined, profitable maker of defense and commercial goods.

But Hughes’ success has exacted a painful human price, particularly in Southern California where the company has a variety of facilities and is a prominent industrial employer.

To become more efficient and to adapt to the post-Cold War era of shrinking Pentagon budgets, Hughes has slashed its Southern California work force 44% since 1990, to 27,000 people from 48,000.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, on-the-job violence has increased nationwide 41% during the past decade.

Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Bettina Boxall, Duke Helfand, Greg Krikorian, Eric Malnic and James Peltz and correspondents Laura Accinelli, Deborah Belgum, Tracy Johnson, Michael Krikorian and Mary Moore.