True Crime Society - Covina Christmas Massacre

On Christmas Eve in 2008, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo dressed up in a Santa suit. He went to the home of his ex in-laws in Covina, California and opened fire. He killed nine people before taking his own life.

As some background into Bruce, he was born on March 23, 1963. He lived in the San Fernando Valley in California.

Bruce graduated from the John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, Los Angeles, and California State University, Northridge. He had worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. Some reports say that he was an aerospace worker.

In 2004, he met a woman named Sylva Ortega. The couple got married in January 2006. They soon encountered trouble. Their marriage is said to have fallen apart within the first year because Bruce would not open a joint bank account with Sylvia. Sylvia had children from a previous relationship and Bruce refused to help Sylvia financially support them.

Some reports also say that Bruce had a child from a previous relationship that he refused to acknowledge or financially support and that Sylvia was not okay with this when she found out. According to Fox, Bruce abandoned his son who was brain-damaged and confined to a wheelchair. Despite abandoning the child, Bruce continued to claim the boy as a tax-write off according to the Los Angeles Times.

Sylvia filed for a dissolution of marriage on March 24, 2008. In June 2008, a divorce court ordered him to pay $1,785 a month in spousal support. In the legal documents for the divorce, Bruce explained that he had been laid off in July 2008.

According to Oxygen, Bruce was fired after his employer realized Bruce had been fraudulently billing clients for hours he didn’t actually work.

Bruce said that he had been denied state unemployment payments in August. He said he was “desperately seeking” work with many companies.

“I was not given a severance package from my last employer at termination and I am not receiving any other income. I am desperately seeking work and have since applied to many companies, resulting in several job interviews,” he wrote. “I ask for support just until I gain employment.”

Bruce also tried to argue that Sylvia was living with her parents, not paying rent and lived an extravagant lifestyle. He said she had purchased a luxury car, went on gambling trips to Las Vegas and spent money on fine dining, massages and golf.

Bruce got the house in the settlement. The property was valued at more than $500,000 but they only had $106,000 equity in the property. The mortgage payments on the house were $2,700 per month.

Bruce complained in a filing that he had monthly expenses of $8,900 and ran a monthly deficit of $2,678.

In June, the court ordered him to pay $1,785 a month in spousal support and put him on a payment plan of $450 a month for $3,570 that was unpaid.

They reached a settlement on December 18 that year.

As part of the settlement, Bruce owed Sylvia $10,000. He also lost custody of a dog he loved and did not get back a valuable piece of jewelery in the split.

“No counseling or delay could help restore this marriage,” the settlement stated. “There are irreconcilable differences which have led to the complete breakdown of the marriage.”

A reporter said, “This divorce shattered Bruce Pardo. It became his obsession. And Bruce began to plot ways to get back at Sylvia. I think that he decided that he wasn’t just gonna kill her, but he was gonna kill everything that she loved and take it, wipe it off the face of the earth.”

His attorney would say that Bruce had trouble making spousal support payments after he lost his job in July. As part of the settlement, those payments were waived and Bruce just had to pay the $10,000 to finalise the divorce.

Despite the messy and bitter divorce, many people only knew Bruce’s good side.

His attorney Stanley Silver would later say “All of my dealings with him were always pleasant and cheerful.”

Bruce had no criminal record or history of violence, and neighbors and others knew him as a friendly man who walked his dog and was a volunteer usher at his parish church. Jan Detanna knew Bruce from church and said “He was very outgoing, he was very friendly. He always greeted you with a smile, he was a pretty big guy and had a firm handshake. It’s a shock to everybody that knew him. You just don’t know what’s going on sometimes.”

Police believe that in the Summer of 2008, Bruce started to put his plan into place. He purchased ammunition and guns and the supplies he would need later in the year. In early fall, he ordered a custom-made Santa Claus suit from a seamstress. The suit cost $300 and came with boots, a belt, glasses and a hat. He told the seamstress that it was for a holiday party. He also requested that it be extra large so that he could be ‘extra jolly.’

Bruce decorated his house for Christmas in 2008 with lights on the roof. He also put Nutcracker soldiers and candy canes on a fence on the property.

Bruce was meant to deliver the $10,000 settlement to Sylvia’s attorney via cashier’s check on December 19. He did not do so.

At 10pm on Christmas Eve, Bruce’s neighbors saw him leaving his home in a vehicle and they wished him a Merry Christmas.

“My dad was like ‘Where are you going?'” recalled Arvin Garcia, 17. “And he said ‘I’m going to a Christmas party,’ and then he left.”

At 11.30pm on December 24, 2008 – Christmas Eve – Bruce drove a rental vehicle to the home of Sylvia’s parents, Alicia and Joseph Ortega. Alicia was 70 and Joseph was 79. He was dressed in his custom Santa suit.

Sylvia was inside the home, along with members of her family.

Charles Ortega (50)
Cheri Ortega (45)
James Ortega (52)
Theresa Ortega (52)
Alicia Ortega Ortiz (46)
Michael Ortiz (17)

Bruce had multiple 9mm SIG Sauer handguns with him. He had also gift wrapped an air compressor that he had converted to spray out racing fuel.

He also had an airline ticket for a Christmas day flight to Canada and $17,000 cash on his body. Some of the cash was attached to his legs with plastic wrap and some was put in a girdle.

An article from the Los Angeles Times says that the family had been playing a game of poker after their Christmas Eve dinner. Many of the adults in the home were getting ready to leave for the night. Michael, the teenager, was playing on his computer.

Bruce knocked at the front door and an 8 year-old girl, Katrina, answered. She happily cried “Santa Claus! Santa Claus!”

Bruce pulled out a gun and shot the child in the face. Bruce then started firing at everyone else in the home. One of the victims, Charles, recognized the gunman and said ‘It’s Bruce!” before he was murdered. Someone else screamed ‘Run, run!”

“There’s some information that he stood over them and shot them execution-style,” Covina Police Chief Kim Raney said.

Nine people would die during his rampage.

Another relative, Irma Ortega, spoke to the media later and said that some of the victims tried to fight back, even after they had been shot.

“Even bloodied, they got up, they stood up,” she said. “They tried to grab him, to stop him. But they couldn’t.”

The only one of the Ortega’s children to survive was Leticia. She is the mother of Katrina, who was wounded. She would later call 911 and say that she had hidden under a table.

“I heard the shots,” Leticia told the police dispatcher in the 911 call. “Everyone started panicking and running, and we all dove under the dining room” table.

Leticia made a break for safety after she saw her injured child leave the house. It is believed that the child survived even though Bruce shot her in the face because she turned her head at the last moment.

The bullet ended up striking her along her jaw.

“I need someone to come over and help my daughter!” Leticia screamed at the dispatcher. “She’s . . . bleeding. She’s been shot on the side of the face!”

Police believe that some younger people in the house survived because they were at the back of the property, playing video games when Bruce broke in.

After Bruce opened fire, he unwrapped the compressor package and sprayed fuel around the home. Police believe that he intended for the fire to be ignited with a flare. The fuel came in contact with an open flame before that though, and caused an explosion.

It is believed that Michael (the teenager) died after the house exploded. He was not shot to death.

A neighbor called 911 following the explosion. “Come immediately! They’re burning down someone’s house.”

When police arrived, one lieutenant said, “When I arrived, to describe it as apocalyptic would be accurate.”

Bruce’s mother had also been scheduled to attend the party and had decided to not go at the last minute because she was sick. It is believed that he intended to also kill her because he felt that she was siding with Sylvia in the divorce.

The seamstress who made the Santa suit was a woman named Jeri Deiotte. She later spoke about what Bruce had ordered. “He wanted it huge, bigger than he was. That’s what triggered it to me because I heard on the news that he carried some guns inside.”

After the unexpected explosion, it is thought that Bruce suffered burns that were so severe they seared his Santa costume to his skin.

“He was probably in a great deal of pain,” said Lt. Tim Doonan.

Despite the injuries, he changed out of the Santa suit and drove 40 miles to his brother’s house.

He left the remains of the singed suit in the car, booby-trapped with a trip wire set to ignite black powder and detonate several hundred rounds of ammunition when disturbed.

Bruce then broke into his brother Brad’s house and shot himself once in the head.

Brad arrived home from a Christmas party to find his brother dead, in a pool of blood.

Once they arrived, police found a single shot from a 9mm handgun in Bruce’s head. There was a 9mm pistol in Bruce’s lap, and there was a second 9mm on the floor.

When police were called, they discovered Bruce’s car. The car exploded when a bomb squad tried to dismantle the booby trap, but no one was hurt.

Police later found a second getaway car, a rented sport utility vehicle, outside the home of his ex-wife’s divorce attorney in nearby Glendale, packed with a spare fuel tank, maps of the US and Mexico, clothing and Christmas presents.

This indicates that Bruce was perhaps intending to make the attorney another victim?

When police searched Bruce’s own home, they turned up racing fuel, five empty boxes for high-powered semiautomatic handguns and two high-powered shotguns.

“He wanted to kill everyone. Even his own mom,” Chapa Ortega told the media. “A monster, a monster. That man was a monster. He killed good, hard-working people who had many friends and who loved the United States.”

In 2016, Leticia told Oprah, “I can’t do anything to change what happened. I can only focus on the future… This is what he’s done. Enough. I’m not going to allow you to continue to consume us with your evilness. You don’t want that anger to live within you day to day and grow, just like it did with this monster.”

She also spoke to the Daily News in 2017:

“I lost my identity completely. I always used to tease them that I have five sets of parents … everyone telling me what to do and how to do it. I can’t even tell you how much I miss them.”

“Everywhere you turn there are memories of what we used to have, and then memories of that night. You can’t escape it,” Leticia said. Christmas “will always be there, and we continue to celebrate it.”

Katrina, who was 8 at the time of the massacre has also spoken to the media.

She spoke at a rally following the Parkland, Florida school shooting and said “Being able to really fight for something that is truly, truly close to my heart is very different.”

“Another one of my cousins had been shot and it’s not something I needed to know all the details to. I just knew I had to keep fighting and I knew that I would live my life to the fullest for each one of my family members and everybody affected by gun violence,” she said.

“You’re left here on this Earth for a reason. You’re left here for a purpose and your job is to keep fighting and to shine that light on everybody else that has been affected,” Katrina said.