A Morbid Aftermath to Store Rampage

The grim story of the calm, bald gunman who killed a checker and a little girl at a Long Beach supermarket grew more bizarre Friday as police revealed a startling discovery: The remains of two people found in the man’s condo a block from the store had been there more than a year.

The bodies of the unidentified pair--so decomposed that even gender identification was daunting--were lying on a bed in a back bedroom where a window overlooks the Top Valu Market, the scene of the gunfire Thursday.

Antonio Pineiro, 48, shot six people before an officer fatally wounded him, Long Beach police said.

Pineiro owned the small two-bedroom unit at 436 Cedar Ave., where police and residents say his elderly Cuban parents lived. Friendly and outgoing, in contrast to their son, neither has been seen by neighbors for more than a year.

“I asked him where they were,” said condo neighbor Paul Cook, who recalled Pineiro regularly carrying large laundry detergent boxes to the unit, sometimes three at a time. “He said they’d moved.”

It was unclear if the bodies were Pineiro’s parents, or how they died.

Neighbors described his mother as crippled, saying it often took her 15 to 20 minutes to climb a short flight of stairs, her husband following to guard against a fall.

The two people Pineiro killed at the store lived in the downtown neighborhood around the store.

Barbara Ibasco, 8, a cheerful third-grader, lived on Cedar, a block from the gunman, and on the night of the shooting she was at the store with her parents to get ingredients for a chocolate cake.

Marcella Perez, 38, who worked several jobs to get by, lived half a mile from the store where she worked as a checker and was shot, her family suspects, as she tried to protect the little girl.

Conrado and Myrna Ibasco, Barbara’s parents, were grazed by bullets, hospitalized Thursday and released. Police identified the other surviving shooting victims, who were not critically injured, as Richard Coleman, 32, of Los Angeles, and Concepcion Henriquez, 58, of Long Beach.

Police knew little about the gunman, characterized by neighbors as a portly and “slow-moving” oddball with no apparent job or interests--cordial as he passed in hallways, often laden with groceries, but lacking the warmth of his parents, Maria and Antonio Sr.

When a neighbor offered, more than once, to help him bring groceries inside the apartment, Pineiro always declined.

The couple were described fondly by neighbors as charmers, especially liked by children to whom they gave candy. None of the residents in the 1950s-era condo building smelled or noticed anything unsavory about the Pineiros’ unit 15.

“Were the bodies moved? Was someone managing the smell of the apartment?” Long Beach police spokesman Dave Marander asked rhetorically. “We may never know what the real story is here.”

According to police, witnesses and those who knew the gunman and victims, there was no apparent target or motive that provoked Pineiro to shoot up his local market. As far as anyone knew, he had no beef with the store, no bounced check, no tattered romance with a clerk or bagger.

In fact, neighbor Cook passed Pineiro in the parking lot as Cook walked out of the store, and the men exchanged waves.

Pineiro, he said, was standing calmly in the parking lot outside the front door, wearing his standard outfit of light blue pants and light blue or white shirt. Though his frame was imposing at 5 feet 9 and 280 pounds, Pineiro was a rather quiet and unassuming man, neighbors in his building said.

Krystal Smith, who rents a neighboring condo, said Pineiro’s daily routine was predictable: He would get up, go to the mailbox, go to the store, walk around the neighborhood, and not much else. He didn’t seem to have a job or anything else to do.

Her son remembered one odd moment the day before the shooting. On Wednesday, he saw Pineiro a few blocks from home, waiting at a bus bench, and he was crying.

“I could tell he was crying,” said Dequan Smith, 12, “because he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes.”

On Thursday, shortly before 5:30 p.m., police started getting frantic 911 calls that a man with two guns had entered the store and was shooting at people. He was still firing when officers arrived. They rushed in and confronted Pineiro, who fired at least one shot before police wounded him. Pineiro died that night in surgery.

Conrado Ibasco, a nurse, said he stopped to buy cigarettes on his way home from work, and happened upon his wife and daughter at the store. He wandered away from them, and the daughter and mother got into the checkout line.

Ibasco heard gunshots and started to run, then he saw his wife. She was screaming. Then he saw his daughter. She was on the floor, covered with blood.

The gunman was in the middle of the store, Ibasco said, and was approaching the couple, forcing them to leave their daughter’s limp body. The gunman, he said, was big, bald, very calm, and wasn’t running around, just standing.

“He looked determined to end somebody’s life and his,” Ibasco said Friday, smoking a cigarette. His wife was too distraught to be interviewed. The couple had tried for years to conceive when they finally had Barbara, “so she was their entire life,” her uncle Nick Ibasco said. The couple kept photo albums chronicling her whole life, from class photos to report cards, and spread them across their coffee table Friday.

Ibasco spoke in a detached voice, referring to his daughter in present tense. Despite seeing the gunman combing the store for targets, the father said he was driven to return to his daughter.

“My wife kept screaming, ‘No! She’s alive! She’s alive!’ But I just knew,” he said.

Marcella Perez had already put in a nine-hour day as an aide in the Long Beach Unified School District by the time she got to Top Valu at 5 p.m. Thursday for her shift as a checker.

Perez, mother of four and grandmother of three, worked two or three jobs, seven days a week, stealing a few hours here and there to giggle with her daughters or go salsa dancing with friends.

She was weary when Pineiro walked into the market with two guns--but her family believes that she was still looking out for others around her, said her daughter, Cathy Perez, 21.

Perez said she was told by witnesses that her mother died trying to shield Barbara Ibasco from the bullets that ripped into both.

As news of the shooting spread, Perez’s family became concerned, then panicked, when their mother didn’t call them. In their two beat-up cars, three generations of the Perez family drove an anxious circuit from the police station to the hospitals to the scene of the crime and back again, begging for news.

Finally, at 4 a.m., police confirmed that Perez was dead.

Friday, as they struggled to figure out how they would pay for a funeral, and how they would continue without their mother’s wages, family members recalled a woman who “was always working” but still managed to find time for dancing and family.

Born in San Diego, Perez grew up in Inglewood and worked for years as an aide in the Los Angeles Unified School District. About 10 years ago, she began working as an aide in the Long Beach district. She dreamed of becoming a teacher, and planned to go back to school if she could ever save enough to quit one of her many jobs. She also sold Tupperware and Mary Kay products.

When not working, her two obsessions were her children’s education and salsa dancing. She managed to combine the two in her dreams for her newest grandchild, 10-month-old Melody.

She often talked about the day when Melody was old enough to go to school, a good school, one where she could go on to college, Cathy Perez said.

Cathy Perez said her mother planned, when Melody was old enough to go to school, to meet her school bus every day. Marcella Perez also hoped Melody would eventually say of her dancing grandmother: “Hey, there’s my grandmother, the hoochie mama.”

Cathy Perez interrupted her story and began crying.

“And she didn’t even live to see her grow up.”

Thursday evening, after Pineiro was stopped, officers made their way to his condo, just across the alley from the supermarket.

They punched a hole in the front door but could not open it, so they broke in through a window, neighbors said. The hole left in the door revealed the modest and tidy furnishings, including an ancient black and white television with a rabbit ear antenna.

“Every officer that went into the place came out with a real dumbfounded look on their face,” said one neighbor, who asked not to be named. “They looked like they couldn’t believe what they had seen.”

Police said little about the scene except that the bodies were mostly skeletal remains and their state of decomposition was such that investigators believe they had been dead more than a year. Autopsies may take more than a week.

No missing persons report on Pineiro’s parents was ever filed. Neighbors said they remember last seeing the couple around Mothers Day of 2001.

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Times staff writers Nancy Wride and Jessica Garrison contributed to this report.