Suicides Los Angeles

An off-duty Los Angeles police officer who was being followed by police accelerated to a high speed and appeared to purposely slam her truck into a concrete freeway pillar in Sun Valley, killing herself, authorities and witnesses said. The air bag on the vehicle deployed, but the 25-year-old officer from the LAPD's Foothill Division was pronounced dead at the scene. She was not wearing a seat belt. LAPD spokesman Lt.

In a calm and lucid voice, the 40-year-old Long Beach man who killed himself on live television last week told a 911 dispatcher that he was unhappy with his "situation" and was "going to draw attention to it whichever way" he could, according to a tape of two emergency calls he made within an hour of his death. "My paramount goal is for no one other than myself to get hurt," Daniel V. Jones said on the tape, an edited version of which was released Tuesday by the California Highway Patrol.

Gerardo Anthony Mosquera Jr. was a good boy in a tough neighborhood, his parents say. He took his studies seriously, enjoyed sports, stayed away from drugs and worked after school to help support his struggling family, which included three younger siblings and an infant son.

Office workers were still traumatized Wednesday by the suicide earlier this week of a man who jumped to his death from high atop a building and landed on the sidewalk in a shower of broken glass. Tin Wong, 39, a Los Angeles waiter, leaped to his death Monday from the 36th floor of the Bank of America Tower. The suicide forced authorities to close 6th and Flower streets for four hours, tying up rush-hour traffic.

A 12-year-old girl who reportedly told classmates last week that she planned to kill herself died Wednesday of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in a Wilmington apartment, authorities said. Paramedics found the seventh-grade girl at her home in a two-story apartment complex in the 1200 block of Wilmington Boulevard after her older sister called 911 about 11:35 a.m., said Los Angeles Police Det. Chuck Hawley. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Officials on Tuesday identified an apparent suicide victim whose body was found after firefighters extinguished a Mid-City house fire early Monday. Victor Karl Hargrave, 49, apparently died after shooting himself in the head, said Det. Paul Coulter of the Los Angeles Police Department. Firefighters responded to a house fire in the 2100 block of South Alsace Avenue about 12:15 a.m. Monday, said Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Bob Collis.

After savagely beating his tenant with a lead pipe and then shooting her three times, a North Hollywood landlord fatally shot himself in the head Saturday, investigators said. The woman, whom police describe only as a 42-year-old employee of Macy's in Beverly Hills, is listed in critical condition at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills. The landlord, Shirabad Edward Khangaldi, 67, died hours after he shot himself in the head, police said.

An apparent suicide Wednesday night on railroad tracks in Santa Ana backed up a dozen trains between Los Angeles and San Diego and delayed about 1,000 passengers for hours, authorities said. An Amtrak train was bound from Los Angeles to San Diego with 115 passengers when it hit a 22-year-old man just south of the Garden Grove Freeway about 5:30 p.m., authorities said.

A week before John En allegedly killed his family and then turned the gun on himself, an old friend of his received a manuscript in the mail with a chilling title: "Last Dream Broken." The typewritten biography documents En's personal troubles that apparently came to a tragic climax early Tuesday in the fatal shooting of his wife and 15-year-old son.

Three people, the victims of an apparent murder-suicide, were found shot to death Tuesday inside their home in the gated community of Porter Ranch in the northwestern San Fernando Valley, police said. The dead included a retired aerospace worker; his wife, who worked as a computer programmer; and their teenage son, according to neighbors, who said the couple had been having financial problems and were on the brink of divorce.