The Nightmare Before Christmas: Bruce Pardo Shot/Set Fire To His Ex’s Family While Dressed As Santa
26 December 2008, 9:28 AM. By Cindy Casares
Bruce Pardo of Covina, California arrived at his former in-law’s house at 11:30pm on Christmas eve dressed as Santa Claus and opened fire on the family inside after an eight year-old girl answered the door. The gruesome act, which began with shooting the young girl in the face and then a sixteen year-old girl in the back, ended with eight unidentified dead bodies. Pardo carried a gift-wrapped package under his arm that contained a pressurized, homemade device containing a liquid that easily sent the house up in flames. Three other people escaped with gunshot wounds. Pardo was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head at his brother’s home in Sylmar.
Pardo’s brother was not home during the act, but it is a suspected suicide. Pardo’s estranged wife is also suspected to be among the murdered and investigators suspect the tragic act was a result of a divorce settlement that had occurred last week for a marriage that lasted only a year. Pardo, 45, had no prior history of violence. Police halted searching for more victims early this morning, but will return to the scene later.
Death toll grows in ‘Santa’ massacre [scotsman.com]
Christmas morning shooting and house fire kills six in Covina [MSNBC]
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The ex-wife was Latina. The family name was Ortega. If it had been the reverse, with a Latino taking out a white family in such a cowardly and cruel manner, you know there would be racist framing. But no, it’s just a “normal” white guy who goes apeshit because his feelings were hurt!. Notice how instead of blaming “culture,” as they would with one of us, they say that “divorce” is what drove him to do it, because God knows you can’t actually ever hold the f*** fully responsible!
Women go through horrible divorces all the time and don’t kill off their husbands’ families for revenge the way some “men” do. What is wrong with these cowards? She doesn’t want you anymore. Get over it!
It’s hard for me to imagine what this man believed he had irrevocably LOST. For me, I would have to, for my own sanity, try to reframe it as a chance to clear the decks and start again. I have almost nothing in the way of material possessions, so losing “everything” isn’t a big deal.
But if I were totally invested in a PERSON, I can, unfortunately, put myself in his position and know that murderous rage happens. But I couldn’t plot like this guy did. I couldn’t hate other people and want to destroy them as well.
I think he really was on some sort of psych medication. Rage attacks with no history of personal violence are a FACT of drugs like Prozac and Celexa and the rest. You take those drugs at significant risk.
@Janeiro
thats very interesting, I never even considered the significance of all that…but I think you are correct
They were married a year, she left him when she found out he was claiming a disabled child from his first marriage on his taxes. The child had severe brain damage. Dad was “babysitting” and there was a pool injury. Seems kind of ugly. She was outraged and left him. Not outraged enough to not file for spousal support after a one or even two year marriage with NO CHILDREN. She got $3500 and he was unemployed no income. Something not right there.
May he burn in the eternal flames of a million hells specifically designed for him, along with that other bastard that shot his ex here on Christmas and the psycho that beat those two little beautiful boys to death…
Kairen: What the hell does the money have to do with this bastard who killed his ex to keep her? If a woman had done this would you have mentioned money? C’mon. He was a batterer. Money wasn’t the problem (Why not just rob them? Why didn’t he take responsibility for himself and sign a prenup if he was so damn sensitive? If he couldn’t get one for financial reasons, why get married at all?). The extreme violence showed that this was personal for him.
She did ask for support (as if that’s an excuse for mass murder), but b/c she didn’t earn enough money working to take care of her kid. She asked him if she could stay with him until her kid finished kindergarten, he agreed, but then she found her stuff on the front lawn. She went to go live with her family but still needed to borrow money from siblings. He said he didn’t have the money the court demanded he pay and yet he had over $17K in cash on him when the bastard died. He was a known liar (e.g., claiming he had a master’s when he didn’t, claiming his disabled son when he refused to financially provide for him, etc.).
My brothers are cops and they consider batterers to be the lowest of the low, along with pedophiles. They’re the worst manipulators and believe they’re victims of the world, holding the wife/girlfriend responsible. Their hysterical pity party comes down to…hurt feelings. That’s it. Hurt. Feelings. Terrorizing these women, abusing them is how they cope. Seriously. That’s why they can’t let them go and usually kill themselves afterward.
They’re also crazy violent. They’re actually the most dangerous criminals for cops to handle. My brother was shot at last year by this man who beat his wife into a coma for burning his toast. No. Lie. He called his violence “self-defense” because apparently his wife knew how much it “killed” him to not have a “good” breakfast. Oh, and he was having a bad week, too. See how messed up they are? They’ll find a reason to attack her because they need to as a form of “release.”
Again, it wasn’t the money. Alright, comment over. It’s just this case really got to me and it’s so sad to read comments at other sites blaming the poor woman for the demented feelings and actions of this coward.
I just read an article that said he got no severance from his job and was denied unemployment. The guy was pissed off with all his bad luck and focused it on his wife and her family. He was humilated and guilty over his first son’s accident and disability yet it seems he muted the memory. Something weird had to be going on in his head to claim the child as a dependant and not support the child financially and emotionally. A normal person who could not cope with what happened would just bury it and never refer to it in anyway because it would be too painful.He must of did weird things that scared his ex-wife so she wanted out. They never mentioned why he was fired, but they did say he lied about his eduction. It appears the employer found out and fired him so he didn’t get severance. Since he was fired he could not get unemployment. It seems he thought his wife betrayed him in his hour of need. Some people define themselves by what they do for a living while living a life of comfort. They freak out when they loose it and they become a “nobody” in their mind. He was a very sick man. He deserves no pity. He tried to get away with it and flee the country. I guess that makes him not only sick, but evil in every sense of the word. I don’t think this could be a hate crime because he didn’t target random people because of their ethnicity. But I do think it would have been portrayed differently if the murderer had been part of a minority race.
Omg! someone had said here that the story would have been portrayed differently if the killer would have been a minority. Finally!!!, someone says something. I thought I was alone in seeing this. The first thing that surprised me was that they didn’t mentioned the ethnicity of Pardo when reporting it in the news. Second, why didn’t 20/20 or the news gave a full inside story about this upstanding Hispanic family. I agree, things would have definitely been different if this was an all white family and the killer would have been a minority. Sad.
I’m suspicious, ( in hindsight of his last acts and reports of his manipulative and deceitful behaviour as a pattern throughout his adult life) that he threw his own kid in the pool, hoping to kill the child.
That child was a crawler at the time, and the accident was handled strangely by him. Instead of calling for paramedics, he was found by the mother, who had gone out for a brief trip to the grocery store, holding the unconscious child frantically, but neither attempting rescussitation or awaiting EMT’s. He insisted they DRIVE to the hospital, instead of summoning help to the scene or instruction for rescusitation. The child was at the ER.
Given the circumstances of the child’s birth, and his flaky reactions in other relationships that have been reported, and the hindsight knowledge that he was capable of such a crime, and motives of resentment of any inconvenient expense or responsibility that pervade his entire life, (his faked timesheets, use of false identities at JPL, his draining of a joint bank account and month-long disappearance after leaving a bride at the altar, whom he had actively concealed any desire to end the relationship from…I think he was capable of fantaciziing a way out of unwanted parenthood, and ACTING on it, in a way that could be attributed to accident.
There’s an interesting anecdote of a former girlfriend floating around…she ended up in a river on a camping trip with Pardo and almost drowned. He laughed at the girlfriend, according to her. Strangely, she hints but does not come out an say that he knocked her into the water.
A quick correction about the support - he was never ordered to pay the woman 3700 a month for spousal support, and the order of spousal support (which PRECEDED his firing) made was between 1700 and 1800, temporary, and largely ordered because he had evicted her from the family home, spent down and hidden joint assets. I’m sure he did not ingratiate himself with the judge by making up almost comical excuses, like a crumb covered kid denying a cookie binge; but the order of support was actually pretty reasonable. He didn’t pay any of it.
The judge at one point ordered him to pay back support at a reduced rate of 450 a month, but all spousal support, past, present, and future, was waived or subsumed in the final settlement. During the period they were married she did contribute to the family income, paying expenses and upkeep, and to their joint savings. The ten-thousand settlement is really a very modest one, (as she brought about 60,000 in gross income into the marriage.) lmuch ess than she might have been entitled to under community property laws, given his spend-down and hiding of assets in anticipation of dissolution of the marriage. She in abandoned any future interest in proceeds of the sale of real property, and took only her personal items.
Full ownership of the family akita ( who was purchased after marriage as a family pet, not before marriage as Pardo’s own pet) was transferred to Sylvia, but only because, as her attorney insists, he did NOT WANT the dog. She also acquired full responsibility for the pets vet bills, food, and care, which Pardo no longer wanted.
Sylvia has been criticized as a gold-digger because of the disparity of income, but it’s natural to choose a man who can provide and protect you. (Reports have him changing overnight after marriage from a loving partner into a withdrawn one who was cold, uncaring, and deeply resentful of any expense his wife did not bear herself.) But she was not a man-hopper, despite her previous marriages. Her first husband was killed in a car crash. SHe was a widow for many, many years and on her own before her second marriage. Friends describe her as generous, hardworking, very loving. Unlike Bruce, who at best is superficially described as “upbeat” by aquaintances, but manipulative, double-dealing, “kid-like” and irresponsible or feckless by those who had much dealing with him.
In hindsight, he was a sociopathic personality with callous disreguard for the feelings of others, who felt justified in any sort of cheating scheme he could pull off.