A Family’s Siege of Terror in Shootout

The first bullet tore through their walk-in closet. By then, Phil and Marilyn Lombardi were cowering on their bathroom floor, shielding their 38-hour-old infant girl from the gunfire.

And until then, they had little reason to doubt their friend Jim Beck.

The tales their next-door neighbor told were wild, but they believed him. He talked about his exploits as a U.S. marshal, about hunting fugitives all over the country, and about a shootout that left his German shepherd wounded.

“It was just fascinating . . . I’d never met a federal agent,” Phil Lombardi said Sunday, as he sat in the kitchen of his Stevenson Ranch home in the Santa Clarita Valley. Outside, a cleanup crew swept up the foundation of the burned-down house where, authorities say, Beck opened fire on law enforcement officers Friday, killing a sheriff’s deputy.

By afternoon, all that remained was a concrete slab and a muddycavity along the neat row of Spanish-style houses.

It was the first sign that things might be returning to normal on Brooks Circle since Beck’s three-hour gun battle with authorities, which ended when flames consumed the house. Sheriff’s officials say they believe a charred body found in the rubble was Beck’s, although a coroner’s spokesman said Sunday the remains had yet to be identified.

The Lombardis had known Beck since he moved into the neighborhood about nine months ago. They did not know he was a former police officer with a long criminal record that included prison terms for weapons violations. And they could never imagine he would be the cause of gunfire that would rip through their windows and walls.

The shootout began when federal agents tried to serve a search warrant on Beck’s house.

Phil Lombardi could hear a voice on a megaphone telling “Mr. Beck” to come out of his house. Then it sounded like officers were trying to break down a door or maybe a gate, Lombardi said. He saw Beck’s girlfriend run outside.

Then Lombardi heard a shot. The deputies retreated behind their cars and he ran upstairs to his wife and baby. Their older girls, ages 5 and 6, were at school.

Phil, 38, and Marilyn, 37, got down on the shag carpet of the bathroom, the farthest room from Beck’s house. Their squat beagle, 12-year-old Maggie, was with them.

That first bullet splintered a wooden shutter and lodged just above the bathroom sink. The Lombardis shut the door to their bedroom and locked it. Marilyn clutched all seven pounds, eight ounces of their daughter. Phil called 911. Marilyn, holding tiny Gianna, was hysterical.

“Make them stop!” she cried. “Tell them to stop!”

The shooting continued for about 45 minutes, Phil recalled. It wasn’t constant, so when it did stop, he got up and checked things out. He heard a helicopter above, so he turned on the television in the master bedroom for some news. Nothing yet. One channel was running “I Love Lucy.”

“You’ve got 500 people out there,” he remembers shouting during one emergency call. “Why can’t you send in at least one to protect us?”

The dispatcher told him a sheriff’s deputy had been shot.

“Stay down, sir,” she said.

About 10 a.m., after the Lombardis had been cowering on the floor about an hour, deputies burst into their home and called for them to come downstairs. As they hurried through the laundry room and into their garage, two deputies met them and ushered them down the street. They hugged the stucco walls of their neighbors’ homes until they reached the end of the block.

Marilyn, with Gianna in her arms, had dressed earlier. Phil was still in a T-shirt and shorts. He had left his shoes at home.

The rest of the morning unfolded for the Lombardis at the “welcome center” of their subdivision. Deputies had commandeered the phone lines and set up their staging area there.

When the announcement came that the 1,300 students of Stevenson Ranch Elementary would be moved to another campus to keep traffic out of the neighborhood, Phil--still shoeless--walked the scorching sidewalks to pick up his girls. His feet still hurt Sunday.

On Saturday night, he and Marilyn told their older daughters that their neighbor Jim had died. The first-grader cried and said a prayer for him.

“I was pretty much in awe of the guy,” said Lombardi, a real estate agent who likes to be in bed by 10.

He said he saw bulletproof vests and assault rifles in Beck’s house, and his neighbor had expressed regret that he had to keep weapons at home.

“You bring homework, I bring homework,” Lombardi remembers Beck telling him. “I’m just cleaning the guns.”

The night before federal agents tried to serve the warrant at Beck’s house, the two men admired an owl on their neighbor’s roof.

“He told me a story about how a badger one time attacked his dog,” Lombardi said. It might have been true. The German shepherd, named Fendi, was what made Beck’s fantasy life as a U.S. marshal seem so real, he said. Not long ago, the dog’s back had been shaved, and Beck said the animal had had surgery for wounds sustained in raid.

Beck let children pet the dog, but there were times when he put on a thick sleeve and commanded Fendi--in German--to attack his arm.

“Sometimes dogs are like their owners, I guess,” Lombardi said. “Dogs can seem pretty nice--but be killers.”

Though neighbors had their suspicions about Beck, Lombardi said he never worried about having him near his children. And he was not among the homeowners who called police on him, he said.

“I was living my normal life,” he said Sunday. “I worked. I came home. Enjoyed my family. Watered my lawn. You know--I did my thing.”

Other Brooks Circle residents Sunday were trying to come to grips with the fact that the investigation of Beck was instigated by local parents who thought he was a child molester.

“The mothers had an instinct, and they followed through on it,” neighbor Frank Sumen said. “You don’t mess around with mom.”

As investigators continued to piece together Friday’s events, neighbors were busy putting their lives back together as well. The 11-year-old son of an LAPD sergeant, who lives in Stevenson Ranch, has collected more than $8,000 from neighbors in memory of slain Sheriff’s Deputy Hagop “Jake” Kuredjian, who was shot in the head.

Some residents spoke of turning the vacant lot into a small memorial park for Kuredjian. “We’re not even sure it’s legal, but the guy gave his life to save our neighborhood,” neighbor Bob Levine said of the plan.

Seven houses, including Beck’s, had been pocked by gunfire during the battle, sheriff’s officials said. One of them was the home of Dianna Rizzo, 38, and her husband. Like the Lombardis, her husband and 4-year-old daughter spent a frightening hour hiding in a back bedroom, exposed to tear gas wafting from Beck’s second-story windows.

“We want it to go away now,” she said Sunday. “We want it to get back to normal.”

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Times staff writer Richard Fausset contributed to this story.