Market Killer Lost Grip on Reality

The night before Joseph Parker cut a bloody swath through a quiet Irvine supermarket, killing two people and wounding three with a sword Sunday morning, he paced inside a Santa Ana house. He didn’t sleep.

At 7:30 a.m. Sunday, his landlady, annoyed by the numerous cigarette butts Parker had squashed on the garage floor, ordered him to sweep them up as she left for church.

“OK,” Parker told Ofelia Bernal. She noticed he was dressed in an overcoat and wearing a beret, puffing on a cigarette.

When Bernal returned at 9:45 a.m., the floor had been swept -- and 30-year-old Parker was dead, shot by police after his rampage in an Albertsons at Culver Drive and Irvine Boulevard where he worked as a bagger.

On Monday, Bernal, 48, struggled to understand what happened to her boarder of eight months, who, she said, in the past month had spoken of hearing voices and walked around talking to himself and laughing.

Parker was an unlikely resident of the southwest Santa Ana neighborhood. He spoke no Spanish, and Bernal spoke little English. He paid $150 a month to sleep on a living room couch and kept most of his possessions in a sports bag.

“When he first arrived, he was normal,” Bernal said. He was polite and respectful and lived an austere life -- reading a Bible, listening to music CDs through a headset. He always ate simply: white rice and fruit.

“But about a month ago, I started seeing a change in him,” Bernal said. “He scared me.”

Eight days before Sunday’s attacks, Parker sprinkled salt on the garage floor.

“He told my son that he had seen the devil, and the devil was coming to take him away. He said the salt would keep the devil away from our house,” Bernal said. “He talked a lot to my son about the devil. He also said that he heard voices in his head. It was disturbing.”

About two weeks ago, he stopped going to work. “He told us that he had been laid off and was going to look for another job,” Bernal said. An Albertsons spokeswoman, however, said Monday that Parker was still an employee the day of the attack. She declined to provide details about his employment history.

Another of Bernal’s boarders said detectives -- who swooped down on the house soon after Sunday’s rampage -- found a diary among Parker’s possessions. Gloria Chavez, 25, said an officer read aloud a passage in which Parker wrote he “would close his eyes at work and see things that other people couldn’t see.”

Chavez said investigators also recovered a receipt for a sword that Parker allegedly purchased at a martial arts store. She said detectives didn’t mention the date of the purchase.

“We’re shocked by what happened because he never gave us reason to think that he would do something like that,” Chavez said. “We’re also wondering where he kept the sword, because nobody here ever saw it.”

Still, Parker’s escalating erratic behavior worried Bernal. Concerned for the safety of her 17-year-old daughter, Bernal asked him Saturday to move out, giving him 30 days to find another place.

“He didn’t seem bothered by it. He just said, ‘OK,’ ” said Chavez.

Bernal said Parker threw away some of his clothes and papers Saturday. Among the items in the trash Monday was a new pair of sandals. There was a Santa Ana Housing Authority apartment application signed Nov. 13, 2002, that listed his yearly income as $5,400. A flier listing the St. Vincent de Paul’s winter shelter program from last year had also been discarded.

Among Parker’s possessions were two bottles of prescription medicine: Depakote, for manic depression, and clonazepam, a medication in the Valium class of drugs used to combat anxiety in patients with schizophrenia. A bottle containing Risperdal, a drug used to treat schizophrenia, was in the trash. Like the other two, it was full of pills.

Taken together, the three drugs reduce agitation and anxiety levels and have an anti-psychotic effect, said Gerald Maguire, a psychiatrist at UC Irvine Medical Center who had no role in Parker’s treatment.

Irvine police released few details Monday about what happened in the store. But Acting Police Chief David L. Maggard Jr., a candidate for permanent chief, praised the way the department handled the situation. “There were a lot of heroes in that store” on Sunday, he said.

Following standard procedure, the officer who fired the fatal bullet and his fellow officers who entered the Albertsons have been placed on administrative leave while the Orange County district attorney’s office investigates the shooting.

Confirming accounts given Sunday by Parker’s co-workers and family, authorities said Monday that he had a history of mental problems.

Orange police said they detained Parker twice one week in 2000 for exhibiting bizarre and potentially dangerous behavior. Parker was taken each time to UCI Medical Center in Orange for observation, said Orange Police Sgt. Dave Hill.

On March 13, 2000, police were called to Orange Lock & Key in the city’s downtown plaza. “[Parker] yelled, ‘It’s a matter of life and death,’ and threw out all the customers and locked the door,” Hill said.

Parker told police he heard a female voice talking in his head, telling him demons were killing her and women and children, Hill said. Parker was unarmed, but officers deemed him a threat and took him to UCI Medical Center for psychiatric observation.

Less than a week later, Parker called police and asked them to come to his residence, saying he was going to kill himself. Hill said Parker again was taken to UCI Medical Center.

Despite his history of mental problems, the question of whether Albertsons can be found liable for Parker’s actions is murky, legal experts say.

The Americans With Disabilities Act prohibits employers from not hiring or from firing people solely because of mental health problems. Though co-workers say Parker behaved oddly while on the job, the question is whether his managers knew of any dangerous or violent behavior -- and if they did, what was done about it.

“It’s very tricky,” said Lew Maltby, president of the Princeton-based National Workrights Institute.

“Employers can’t ignore these types of situations until there’s a blowup.... But you also can’t fire everybody who looks a little strange. If you fire everybody who looks a little strange, you’re going to have ADA suits up to your eyeballs.”

Richard Denenberg, author of a book on workplace violence and co-director of the nonprofit think tank Workplace Solutions, said it’s difficult to prove that an employer was negligent in hiring or retaining an employee who later kills.

“The legal liabilities of employers have never been precisely defined,” Denenberg said. “It’s hard to know whether somebody is dangerous -- often the signs are pretty subtle. It’s difficult to sort out what dangerous behavior is from just being an oddball.”

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Times staff writers Jack Leonard, Stuart Pfeifer and Christine Hanley contributed to this report.