Purse-Snatcher Sought in Slaying

A gunman fought a 46-year-old woman for her purse outside Norm’s restaurant in Bellflower and when she wouldn’t give it up, shot and killed her while her disabled husband helplessly looked on, police said Thursday.

Sheila McMackin of Bellflower was pronounced dead at a hospital just before 11 p.m. Wednesday. Her husband, Charles McMackin, 55, was held at bay by a second robber who made off with the $1 in his wallet.

Charles McMackin was not injured and the gunmen were still at large Thursday.

On Thursday, McMackin, along with 27-year-old daughter Sheila Simms and 10-year-old granddaughter Jennifer Miller, returned to Norm’s. While mostly oblivious lunch-rush diners came and went through the same door McMackin and his wife had used the night before, her family placed a bouquet of red carnations in the handicapped parking space where she battled a robber and lost.

“I put those down in memory of my mother,” Simms said. “She was always a happy person, a strong person and I know she fought to the end.”

That, police said, might have been her undoing.

The McMackins, who would have been married 26 years on Tuesday, had gone to Norm’s probably “a thousand times,” her husband said.

They parked in the first parking stall, a handicapped slot, because Charles McMackin’s bad knees, hips and back force him to use two canes.

At dinner, Charles McMackin used all the money he had to pay for the meal--except for one dollar. The couple, parents of one son and one daughter, left the restaurant shortly after 9 p.m. Sheila McMackin got to the car ahead of her husband, Charles McMackin said, and got in the passenger side. Moving gingerly with his canes, Charles McMackin said, he remembered looking down to check the placement of his walking aids and then looking up to see what he thought was someone asking his wife for directions.

But then he saw the man reaching into the car, and became alarmed.

“I’m yelling at him, ‘Hey! Get away from the car!’ ” McMackin said, and then he felt a gun against his head and heard the demand for money.

He handed it over and looked up just in time to see a flash and hear a shot. The two men walked a few feet and then sprinted away, he said.

“I can’t run,” Charles McMackin said. “I walked to her, I got in the right side of the car and I told her to hold on.”

Charles McMackin said he got into the driver’s seat as quickly as he could and drove his wife to nearby Lakewood Regional Medical Center, where she died from a gunshot to her upper body, authorities said.

Sheriff’s deputies described the men as between the ages of 17 and 25, white or Latino, 5 feet 7 to 5 feet 9, 130-150 pounds with dark hair and dark complexions.

Charles McMackin pleaded for the public’s help in finding the men who killed his wife.