4 dead in murder-suicide at Granada Hills home, police say

A man in his 80s killed his wife and two adult children in a Granada Hills home before killing himself Saturday night, Los Angeles police said.

Officers responded to a call about a shooting at 6:50 p.m. in the 11600 block of Lerdo Avenue, where they found three victims — a woman in her 80s and a man and a woman in their 40s — said LAPD Lt. Blanca Lopez. Officers also found the body of a man in his 80s who appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“They all appear to be family,” Lopez said. “This is an isolated incident.”

When they arrived at the sprawling, Spanish-style home, officers forced their way in, where they were met by a woman who had survived the gunfire by barricading herself in another room and calling for help, authorities said. The woman directed the officers to another part of the house where they found several bodies. Lopez couldn’t say whether the woman was also a family member.

Police monitor the scene where four people were shot to death on Lerdo Avenue in Granada Hills on Saturday. The house in the background is next door to where the shooting took place.

(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)

During a briefing for reporters Saturday night, LAPD Capt. Kelly Muniz said that “the only positive point is that you at least have one witness who has survived this incident.”

“I don’t know how much more terrifying and horrific of a scene it could be,” Muniz said.

One man who’d been in the area at the time told local TV stations he’d been playing video games with his cousin when they heard shooting.

“We just heard gunshots next door,” he said, “Then we were like, ‘Holy moly, what do we do?’ And then we looked online and there was four people dead and that’s all we know.”

People in the driveway of a home Sunday where police say a man shot and killed his wife and his two adult children in Granada Hills before killing himself Saturday.

(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)

The Lerdo Avenue home is in a neighborhood of large, upscale houses in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains, just above the 118 Freeway near Zelzah Park.

It’s a section of Granada Hills that is quiet and safe, where people largely know each other, community members said. But neighbors in adjacent and nearby houses said the slain family largely kept to themselves.

Richard and Cheryl Asperger said they were surprised to hear about the shooting when they returned home around 9:30 p.m. Saturday as helicopters circled overhead.

“This is a nice neighborhood. To think that a triple homicide or a shootout can happen, that’s not what we moved here for,” said Richard, 62.

The couple have lived in the neighborhood for a decade and said they’ve seen an increase in crime lately, including a recent shooting at a home near theirs in which no one died.

But Cheryl, 73, said, “These things can happen anywhere” when guns are as prevalent as they are.

“Everyone loses their temper sometimes. But people are too used to picking up a gun,” Richard said.

“You know damn well the neighbors are going to say, ‘He’s such a nice guy; he used to take our trash cans out for us.’ ”

On Sunday morning, the neighborhood was calm with no obvious signs of the violence from the night before. Palm and eucalyptus trees waved in the slight breeze just before noon when Eva Amar, a longtime neighbor, tucked into the gate a plastic-wrapped bouquet of lilies and roses she’d purchased at a nearby market.

“Sometimes people who do this type of thing feel forgotten,” Amar said, her big brown eyes damp with emotion. “Loneliness seems to be an epidemic these days.”

She didn’t know what other people might be going through behind closed doors, she said, and hoped the pink and red flowers would signal that somebody cared.

They were a “quiet family,” she added with a sigh. “No parties, no problems.”