4 Die in Murder-Suicide, Police Say

A 31-year-old Bellflower man shot his young wife and two other people to death before killing himself in his condominium Monday morning, police said.

Police rushed to the home after the panicked wife called 911. She’d been shot, she said. A dispatcher heard gunfire in the background.

By the time squad cars arrived and officers burst into the stone condominium, it was too late. A man and a woman were dead in an upstairs bedroom; another couple lay motionless on the first floor. None has been identified.

The 25-year-old woman and the 31-year-old gunman were in the middle of a divorce, Sheriff’s Lt. Don H. Bear said. Neighbors said the wife’s family fought violently with her husband, and the quiet street was often disturbed by screaming fights, sometimes between husband and wife.

“I kind of felt something miserable like this would happen eventually,” neighbor Al Hansen said. “They were always spitting out anger. Saying god-awful things.”

The gunman apparently shot his brother-in-law and a woman believed to be that man’s girlfriend in an upstairs bedroom and then went downstairs, where he shot his wife and then himself, Bear said. A gun was found by the killer’s side, police said.

The gunman worked for his brother-in-law, Bear said, but neighbors said the two didn’t get along.

But others recalled the gunman as a gentle man who chatted over the fence, raced model cars and loaned his dirt bike to children.

As investigators swarmed in and out of the home in the 9400 block of Ramona Street, the gunman’s brother lingered by the roadside.

“He was my only brother,” said the man, who refused to give his name. “He was very bright and very intelligent. He could have done anything in life.”

Neighbor Melissa Madrid said residents of the house “were never sociable or anything like that.”

Visitors came and went at all hours of the night, neighbors said. Nobody was certain how many people shared the condominium.

“They were always arguing and fighting,” Hansen said. “All hours of the night. Sometimes at 3 a.m. in the morning I’d have to yell, ‘Shut up!’ ”