Body Found After Mission Viejo Standoff

Orange County sheriff’s deputies surrounded a Mission Viejo home for about three hours Thursday after a delivery driver reported being met at the front door by a bloodied man wielding a gun, authorities said.

No one else was in the house in the 27000 block of Carballo when a special weapons team entered and found the man dead, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino said. The man, whose name was not released, may have been despondent over being jobless, he said.

The incident began about 1:30 p.m., when a FedEx deliveryman arrived to deliver a package. A man holding a gun answered the door and told the deliveryman that his wife wasn’t home, although she later told officers she had been asleep upstairs.

The deliveryman immediately notified authorities, who surrounded the home. As a precaution, they also asked administrators at nearby Bathgate Elementary School to keep children on campus until they could be released to their parents.

Amormino said that as deputies surrounded the house, the man’s wife ran outside. As she did so, officers heard a gunshot from inside the house.

Deputies tried to contact the man by telephone until about 3:30 p.m., when they entered the house and discovered his body. An investigation was continuing, Amormino said.