Family Dies in Murder-Suicide

Three people, the victims of an apparent murder-suicide, were found shot to death Tuesday inside their home in this gated community in the northwestern San Fernando Valley, police said.

The dead were a retired aerospace worker and his wife, a computer programmer, and their teenage son, according to neighbors, who said the couple had been having financial problems and were on the brink of divorce.

Authorities declined to identify the victims, saying they had to notify relatives. But neighbors said they were John and Nancy An and their son, Franklin, 15, who had lived in the upscale tract development about four years.

The bodies were discovered Tuesday afternoon by firefighters who were contacted by a private security guard dispatched to the home by concerned neighbors. The woman and teenager were found in the living room of the home at 12004 Stone Gate Way, while the man was found in an upstairs bedroom, a handgun nearby, according to Los Angeles Police Det. Marshall White of the Devonshire Division.

One neighbor said the boy had been shot in the back while running for the door, which was marred by bullet holes. White and other authorities declined to discuss details.

A handful of neighbors gathered at the scene said they were not entirely surprised by the deaths, despite the seeming serenity of their enclave in the Santa Susana Mountains.

The couple’s troubles in recent months had been increasingly apparent. They had loud arguments in their native Mandarin Chinese, and Nancy An had confided to at least one neighbor that she was planning to divorce her husband and was afraid of him.

“Nancy said that her husband’s personality was very strange,” the neighbor, Lee-yea Chung, said. “[She] told me her husband has a gun, so ‘I have to be careful.’ ”

Chung said that shortly after that conversation, about six months ago, Nancy An took a short trip to her sister’s in New York. By the time she returned, John An had moved out of the house, Chung said. But he began visiting in the evenings sometime in September.

In the last week, An complained that her husband was not helping with the $1,800-a-month mortgage, according to Chung.

An said she already was two months behind on her mortgage payments. In another month, the bank would foreclose on the home, she told Chung. Still, An refused to allow her husband to move back in the house.

“She just told me that she wanted a divorce,” Chung said.

The couple’s tensions were compounded by Franklin’s announcement that he would rather live with his mother than his father, Chung added.

Chung’s 15-year-old son Jason said he tried to make friends with Franklin, but that the youth’s father kept him constantly busy with studies and household chores.

“His dad kept making him work in the garden and around the house and stuff,” he said. “So he couldn’t, like, play basketball or anything.”

Jason Chung said that he and Franklin went to the same Chinese language class on Saturdays at Monroe High School.

Chia Ping Li, 52, a medical researcher who lives four houses down, lamented the tragedy on his street, especially the involvement of young Franklin in his parents’ turmoil.

“It’s very sad,” he said. “His life had just started. He had such a bright future before him.”

The neighbors’ mounting concerns peaked Tuesday morning when Chung noticed burnt Chinese currency littering the lawn between her home and the Ans’. Burnt money is often offered as a sacrifice to ancestors who have passed to the next world, and is a common mourning ritual among some Buddhists, she added.

“I thought it was very strange to see that,” Chung said. “I felt something was wrong.”

Later Tuesday morning, before she left for her classes at Pierce College, Chung noticed that Nancy An’s tan Mercury was idling in the driveway. She went next door and rang the doorbell but there was no answer.

“Then I went to the backyard and yelled: ‘Nancy! Nancy!’--still no answer,” she said.

Chung then told her husband to call the private security force that patrols the development to make sure the family was all right.

A security guard left a note on the car around 9 a.m. When a guard found the car still running at 1 p.m., the Fire Department was notified.