Suicides Los Angeles

Three people, the victims of an apparent murder-suicide, were found shot to death Tuesday inside their home in this gated community in the northwestern San Fernando Valley, police said. The dead were a retired aerospace worker and his wife, 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. Authorities declined to identify the victims, saying they had to notify relatives.

The Los Angeles Police Department said Sunday that a veteran police officer wanted for questioning in a hit-and-run driving investigation was not given preferential treatment, allowing him to flee a police station and commit suicide. LAPD spokesman Mike Partain said Officer Bryce Wicks was not even a prime suspect when he fled the North Hollywood station Friday. "No rules or guidelines were violated in any way, shape or form," Partain said.

Less than an hour before the hit-and-run accident that apparently prompted Officer Bryce Wicks to take his own life, the 28-year veteran Los Angeles police officer seemed the happiest he had been in months, a fellow officer said. Det. Gil Uribe, one of about 50 people who attended a Reseda retirement dinner with Wicks just hours before the accident, said he seemed relaxed. "It was a lot of us sort of old guys, just shooting the breeze," Uribe said. "It was real low-key."

An employee at a Los Angeles Times telemarketing office fired numerous gunshots at his co-workers Tuesday night, wounding one man and barricading himself in an office where he was later found dead of what authorities believed were self-inflicted gunshot wounds.

Fighting back tears, actor Carroll O'Connor's daughter-in-law recounted the drug-induced hallucinations and paranoia that plagued her husband during the months before he committed suicide. Angela O'Connor, bowing her head and sobbing at one point, on Friday described the last time she spoke to her 32-year-old husband, Hugh. "It was our wedding anniversary and I wanted to tell him I loved him and I wanted to see how he was doing," she said.

A plastics factory inspector who killed two colleagues and wounded four others Thursday apparently began his shooting frenzy because he thought co-workers had mocked his sexual orientation, police said Friday. "I am not gay!" Daniel S. Marsden, 38, yelled during the rampage, police said. Officials said it remains unclear whether other factors caused him to attack his fellow employees.

A 38-year-old factory inspector, apparently upset by an argument with co-workers, went on a shooting rampage at a Santa Fe Springs plastics company Thursday, killing two colleagues and wounding four others as he calmly walked through the plant's offices, police said. The gunman, identified as Daniel S. Marsden of Long Beach, fled the scene in his gray Camaro.

A man who jumped parole in Oregon for sexual assault on a child and was then arrested on charges of raping an 11-year-old Burbank girl hanged himself in his jail cell, city and county authorities said Wednesday. Burbank police said they tried to send Peter Kurges, 28, back to Oregon for parole violations before the alleged Burbank rape occurred but were turned down by Oregon authorities.

A man drove his three children to an isolated hilltop above the lights of downtown Los Angeles and apparently shot two of them to death Friday before turning the gun on himself, police said. Investigators believe that the man, Jesus Velasquez, 27, killed his son, about 7 years old, and daughter, about 8. He apparently also tried to kill his younger daughter, about 3, but she suffered only a grazing wound on the side of her head.