O.C. Man Is Held in Baja Sniper Slaying

A Buena Park man accused of using a high-powered rifle to ambush cars with California license plates was being held by Mexican police Wednesday in Tijuana in the killing of a Southern California woman.

Dennis Albert Macchione, 33, denied in a jailhouse interview that he was the sniper who opened fire last weekend along a Baja California highway crowded with American tourists.

Macchione blamed the shootings on a drunken friend, whom he refused to identify.

“I’m paying the price for the dude I was with,” Macchione said through a steel grate at the Tijuana city jail.

His mother--Barbara Macchione--expressed shock at her son’s arrest.

“I can’t believe it,” she said in an interview from the porch of the family home in Buena Park. “He’s quiet. He doesn’t bother nobody unless they bother him first.”

The mother described her son--a divorced manual laborer who lived with his parents and had been employed by Sears and the Salvation Army--as interested in religion, but slow-witted.

“He likes to read a lot,” she said. “The Bible. About the saints.”

Neighbors along the cul-de-sac where children played outdoors Wednesday evening painted a different picture of Macchione.

“He’s threatened everyone on this street, including me. He’s definitely a strange person. He even threatened women in the neighborhood,” said Joe Colapietro, 54.

Mexican prosecutors expect to charge Macchione with murder today, said Jose Lauro Ortiz, a spokesman for the Baja California attorney general’s office.

Ortiz identified the dead woman as Debra Lynn Penny Campos, 46, of Brawley, Calif.

Her husband, Vicente, said she was a retired California prison guard who had gone to Baja for the weekend with two friends.

Campos was killed about 4 p.m. Friday as she rode with two friends in a pickup with California plates about 40 miles south of the border, Ortiz said.

The bullet smashed through the windshield, struck her in the head and continued out the back window, Ortiz said. By the time authorities arrived, she was dead.

“He told police he did it for fun,” Ortiz said.

The shootings continued Saturday, when a minivan was struck, and Sunday, when a passenger car was hit along another highway between Rosarito and Ensenada on the Pacific coast, said Clint Wright, a spokesman for the U.S. consulate in Tijuana.

Consular officials interviewed Dennis Macchione on Wednesday and advised him of his rights under Mexican law, Wright said.

In the interview, Macchione said a friend he was camping with got drunk and began firing randomly from a hill. He said the friend drove back to the United States, leaving him to walk back.

Mexican police stopped him along the highway near Rosarito. Ortiz said authorities were searching for suspects in the shootings when they spotted Macchione on the highway.

Macchione said he made a deal with police to show them where the rifle was hidden if they would let him go. Instead, he was taken into custody.

“They betrayed me,” he said.

Times staff writers David Haldane and Jack Leonard contributed to this report.