Gunman's careful plans went awry

From his homemade incendiary device to his Santa Claus outfit, 45-year-old software engineer Bruce Jeffrey Pardo meticulously planned his Christmas Eve massacre.

He apparently planned his escape, booking a flight out of state.

But the firebomb Pardo set off melted the Santa suit into his flesh, causing third-degree burns and foiling his getaway.

Pardo's intent to flee rather than to kill himself, as he later did, was among the many developments presented by investigators and gleaned from court records and interviews with neighbors and family members Friday about the killings that horrified the country. A ninth body was discovered at the Covina home of Pardo's former in-laws.

Pardo had stormed his ex-wife's parents' annual holiday party and slaughtered revelers with a barrage of bullets before setting the home on fire.

The coroner has not identified the victims. But a relative, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the dead included Pardo's ex-wife, her parents, two of her brothers and their wives, a nephew and a sister.

Divorce records indicated a bitter split that climaxed Dec. 18 with a hearing in which Pardo's ex-wife, Sylvia, was granted a cash settlement and his beloved dog, Saki.

"From what I understand, at that hearing, it became very contentious," said Lt. Tim Doonan of the Covina Police Department. "It's possible he started planning this prior to last Thursday. But based on Thursday . . . it might have been the trigger."

A major reason for the divorce, according to a source close to the investigation, was Sylvia Pardo's discovery that Pardo had abandoned his son years before after the boy suffered brain damage in a near-drowning accident as the father baby-sat him.

Compounding her anger was that Pardo continued to use the child as a tax write-off for seven years. She demanded he stop claiming his son as a dependent.

Regardless of what happened in court, at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, Pardo arrived at the home of Joseph and Alicia Ortega, his ex-wife's parents.

Pardo had disguised a pressurized fuel tank as a Christmas package and responded to the 8-year-old girl who answered the door to Santa Claus with a blast from a semiautomatic handgun.

He entered the home, firing indiscriminately, before advancing more like a deliberate executioner.

"I need someone to come over and help my daughter!" the girl's mother can be heard screaming to a 911 police dispatcher, according to a transcript released Friday. "She's been shot on the side of the face."