U.S. Man Held in Fatal Baja Highway Sniping

An American tourist accused of using a rifle to fire on cars with California license plates was being held by Mexican police Wednesday in the death of a Southern California woman.

But Dennis Albert Macchione denied in a jailhouse interview with Associated Press that he was the sniper who opened fire along a Baja California highway crowded with American visitors.

Macchione, 33, of Buena Park, blamed the shootings on a drunk friend.

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

Prosecutors planned to charge him with murder at a court hearing today, said Jose Lauro Ortiz, a spokesman for the Baja California state 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.

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

The shootings continued Saturday, when a minivan was struck, and Sunday, when a car was hit along the highway that winds through a series of small coastal resorts between Rosarito and Ensenada on the Pacific coast, said Clint Wright, a spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana.

Macchione told Associated Press that a friend he was camping with got drunk and began firing randomly from the hill. He said the friend, whom he refused to identify, fled in their car back to the United States.

The jailed man’s mother, Barbara Macchione, said her son is a divorced manual laborer who lives with his parents.

“He’s quiet,” she said. “He doesn’t bother nobody unless they bother him first.”