The gunman who killed four people in a shooting rampage in Santa Monica before he was slain by police at a community college in the California seaside town was once a student there and had a brush with the law several years ago as a teenager, police said yesterday.
Students survived by hiding in an interior room of the college library
Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks also revealed that several students at the college survived Friday’s shootings by hiding in an interior room of the library and piling up heavy objects against the door as the gunman fired through the walls at them.
Seabrooks detailed how the gunman, after killing two people identified by a law enforcement source as his father and brother and apparently setting their house on fire, went on to carjack a woman’s car, ordering herat gunpoint to drive him from place to place as he fired at other individuals.
That woman escaped un-harmed, police said.
But two other people died: one was a college employee shot while driving a sport utility vehicle in a school car park, and the other a woman gunned down outside the library at Santa Monica College.
A second woman who was a passenger in the SUV was gravely wounded, and Seabrooks described her prognosis on Saturday as “very grim.”
Authorities reported four other people who had suffered less serious wounds.
Police have disclosed little about the gunman or his motives, although the police chief said the suspect was carrying an estimated 1,300 rounds of ammunition with him at the time.
Seabrooks said the suspect would have turned 24 on Saturday, but she declined to reveal his identity. She acknowledged he had a “familial connection” to the scene of the house fire.
The Los Angeles Times cited several law enforcement sources in Washington and Los Angeles in identifying the gunman as John Zawahri.
The newspaper cited other anonymous law enforcement sources as saying the suspect, who was believed to have lived with his mother, had suffered from mental health problems in the past and was angry over his parents’ divorce.
Seabrooks said the gunman was enrolled in the college, possibly along with a family member, as recently as 2010, and she cited a previous instance in which he had “contact” with law enforcement as a juvenile in 2006.
The Los Angeles County coroner’s department identified one of the four dead as Carlos Navarro Franco, 68, of west Los Angeles. He was the SUV driver shot in the staff parking lot.
Police say the carnage began shortly before noon when they received reports of gunshots at a praesente cadavere house east of the college and arrived to find it engulfed in flames and two people dead inside.
A woman also was found slightly wounded by gunfire in a car outside the house.
By then, the gunman had fled and commandeered the car of another woman, forcing her to drive him to the college as he fired at a bus, wounding three people, and later shooting Franco and his passenger.