I don't know how many people have seen this movie, Chinese called "Silent Night", but this Silent Night means Christmas Eve in English. The content roughly describes the story of a neurotic who carries out a massacre on Christmas Eve with an axe and a flamethrower. But this movie is not the screenwriter's brain hole, but from a real case that happened in 2008, this dog and everyone to make up this story.
On Christmas Eve, December 24, 2008, more than 20 people were spending Christmas Eve in a house on East Norcrest Avenue in Covina, Los Angeles, California, when the doorbell rang at about 11:30 p.m., and the 8-year-old girl opened the door and saw a Santa Claus pushing the gift station at the door, and the girl was happy. But what I didn't expect was that Santa Claus handed her not a gift, but a gunshot, and the little girl immediately fell at the door, and she couldn't understand why Santa Claus would shoot at her.
Subsequently, Santa Claus went indoors and shot, and also took out the homemade flamethrower in the cart and set it on fire, which eventually killed 9 people and injured 3 people at the scene.
As usual, let's talk about the culprit, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, 45 years old.
Born into an intellectual family, his father was an engineer, and he himself showed a strong talent for mathematics from an early age, and after graduating from high school, he enrolled in computer science at the University of California, Bay Northridge. After graduation, he went to work as a software engineer at a jet propulsion laboratory, and Bruce belonged to the elite class from the perspective of his position.
His friends and colleagues thought Bruce was smart and playful. Once he hacked into the lab's system and dug up a payroll for all the company's employees, for no other purpose than to show off how good he was.
Even more exaggerated, in 1988 he was engaged to a female colleague in the laboratory, because Bruce said that he did not have much money at the time, so the money for the wedding was paid by the woman. Who knew that Bruce did not come on the wedding day, and the woman stupidly waited for half a night before finding that the two of them were married to $3,000 less in the joint account...
That's right, Bruce ran away with the money from the common account...
In the '90s, Bruce talked about a girlfriend, Tina Westman, and Tina said that Bruce was like a big kid, smart and cute, but sometimes not light or heavy. For example, once they went rafting, and Tina fell into the water, Bruce was not in a hurry to save him, but teased her on the boat, thinking it was stupid.
In 2001, Bruce married a sister named Elena Lucano and had a daughter, but with a 13-month-old child born to her ex-husband. Once, when Elena was not at home, Bruce kept watching TV and not taking care of the child, and the child fell into his outdoor pool. Although he was eventually rescued, he was deprived of oxygen for too long, and his brain was problematic and crippled. They divorced after that.
Bruce met Sylvia in 2004 and married in January 2006. But the two fell into marital crisis in 2007, and in 2008, Sylvia formally filed for divorce. The court ruled that Bruce was required to pay Sylvia $1,785 a month in alimony, plus a lump sum of $10,000 (Bruce had secretly stolen common property).
Divorce was a trigger because Bruce set fire to the house situation at Sylvia's parents' house. The direct reason is that Bruce has no financial habits, and is too loose, although smart, but the expenses are far greater than the income, frequent job hopping also makes him a bumpy promotion. He was losing $2,678 a month and had more than $30,000 in credit card debt.
Sylvia (left), Bruce (right)
Judging from the above experience, Bruce is a smart but too playful person to say bad, because he does not have any case. But in his 40s, he still had no plans for himself, leading to financial and emotional failures. In particular, the sentence after the divorce made his financial situation worse than enough, so he took some money from the couple's joint account early, took revenge on his ex-wife's family, and then planned to flee to Canada (the police later found a ticket to Canada).
Next is the crime process:
On the evening of December 24, 2008, Christmas Eve. It was the equivalent of the Chinese New Year, with most of the shops closed on the streets, families gathered for dinner, and Sylvia's siblings and their children gathered at the home of Joseph Ortega (Bruce's former father-in-law) on this day, with 25 grandchildren in three generations.
After dinner, everyone chatted and the children played games.
But no one knew, Bruce had prepared 4 pistols, a homemade flamethrower, dressed in Santa Claus clothes, and came to their doorstep.
At 11:30, Bruce rang the doorbell. 8-year-old Caterina opened the door and Bruce knew her, the daughter of his ex-wife's sister and his niece.
Caterina was happy to see Santa Claus standing in the doorway, but her smile just appeared on her face, a 9mm pistol bullet pierced her innocent cheek, the people in the house heard the gunshot, saw the child lying on the ground, looked at the gun in Santa Claus's hand at the door, after a short silence, the whole house began to scream and scatter and run.
Bruce shot at the crowd without hesitation, and when the people in the living room were almost dispersed, he opened the homemade flamethrower disguised as a gift car.
Moments later, the whole house was in flames, and neighbors heard the people who escaped screaming, saw people trapped on the second floor calling for help, and saw people jumping directly from the upper floor and breaking their legs.
There is a recording of the 911 alarm on the Internet, "santa shooting'911 calls, which was made by Sylvia's sister, and if you can find it, you can hear her describing the tragic situation on the scene with a crying voice."
The fire in the house was so big that the flames were strung more than ten meters high, and it took 80 local firefighters an hour and a half to basically extinguish the fire. But the prolonged burning also led to the fact that the 9 dead at the scene had to rely on dentists to identify themselves.
By the morning of December 25, the house was still smoking.
The dead included Bruce's ex-wife Sylvia, ex-father-in-law Joseph, ex-mother-in-law Alicia, and brother-in-law and sister-in-law. Among them, the ex-wife and former father-in-law had gunshot wounds, and the rest died in arson. It can be seen that Bruce shot purposefully when he entered the hall and shot, but fortunately the little girl who was shot in the face at the door survived.
Bruce fled the scene after igniting the fire, and he ran to his brother's house 30 miles away. Dead when he was found, I found Bruce's autopsy report online, he shot himself with a pistol in his mouth, the bullet went straight out of the top of the head, and the dead could not penetrate anymore. The police searched for a plane ticket he planned to travel to Canada, but it wasn't worth his choice to commit suicide.
In addition, the police also found santa claus clothes in his car↑ at the time of the crime
On Christmas Eve, American artillery firefights flew all over the house, and the flames lit up, and the rubble and scorched corpses were crushed