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By Steve Huff in Mass Murder, bizarre, homicide
Friday, Dec. 26 2008 @ 8:41PM

A KCAL news segment about the Christmas Eve massacre committed by Bruce Pardo.

Former aerospace engineer Bruce Jeffrey Pardo had no criminal record. He had no known history of violence. On December 24, he committed an act of mass murder that stunned the nation.  Bruce gave history the nightmare come true of the monster in the Santa suit, standing at the door to a home filled with happiness and Christmas cheer.

Just before the calendar turned over to Christmas Day, 2008, an 8-year-old girl opened the door to the Santa-suited Pardo. Then all hell broke loose. At least 9 were dead before he was done, including his ex-in-laws, the Ortegas, and his former wife, Sylvia Pardo.

According to the Associated Press, Pardo's attack on the Ortega Family home on Knollcrest Drive in Covina, CA sowed the seeds of his suicide later that night at the home of his brother Brad in Sylmar, CA. The AP reported Friday that Pardo had been burned in the explosion that precipitated the fire that gutted the Ortega residence. The burns may have been so severe that Pardo decided the next best thing to do was kill himself. He'd planned for something else, though -- several thousand dollars were attached to his body with plastic wrap and a girdle, and he had some plane tickets to Canada.

Reading about the Covina tragedy and Pardo's assault on the home of his ex-wife's family, it is easy to believe he was an ice-cold, cruel, calculating monster.

He may have been just that. But the portrait that is emerging of Pardo through some past acquaintances is neither as benign as the sketch of the devout Catholic who volunteered to usher for church services nor as vicious as the view anyone might hold learning of the massacre committed on Christmas Eve.

Bruce Pardo was weird. Not spooky weird, either. But definitely strange. The blogger who writes BrokenCountry.com claims he knew Pardo in passing, and in a post made on Christmas Day, he told an interesting story to illustrate Pardo's alleged weirdness:

I remember Mr. Pardo as being kind of nutty, and I am not just saying this because of the current tragedy. On several occasions I had to leave a door note explaining that I could not get in the back yard to service his swimming pool. The reason was because there was enough dog poop on the ground to make a clay model of a Buick Roadmaster.

So Mr. Pardo called and was rather irate and asked if I could come by on a Saturday as he would have it cleaned up. I did just that, but upon arrival the dog feculance was still there. I knocked on the door and Bruce Pardo came out and said " Oh what's the big deal? Mr. Pardo proceeded to kick the mushy piles of dooty out of the way with his bare foot.

Mr. Pardo had crap all over his foot. I went out to the pool thinking "how is he going to get all the dooty off of his foot? I will tell you how. As I am setting up to clean his filthy pool, Mr. Pardo walks over to the steps in the shallow end, puts his foot in the water, shakes it vigorously and proceeds to rub the poop off with his bare hands. I mean Mr. Pardo did this as if he did it all the time. Without hesitation.

I waited for him to go back in the house and I packed my stuff and left never to return again.
[I think it's worth noting that this post has already received a comment indicating that this story from BrokenCountry.com may be a fake. A check of records for a 45-year-old Bruce J. Pardo showed past residency at addresses in Sylmar, Woodland Hills and Prescott, AZ. No actual street addresses for Pardo in Covina, and BrokenCountry does claim Pardo was renting a home in Covina at the time of the story related above.  ~ Ed.]

Earlier today, I contacted a woman who dated Bruce Pardo several years ago for some insight into the man who will now be forever known as the Santa Slayer, or some even more tabloid variation on that moniker. I agreed to only use her first name, Tina, for the interview.

I first asked Tina about the story published on BrokenCountry.com. I wondered if that was characteristic of the Bruce she knew. Tina responded, "TOTALLY. He once asked me where babies came from."

Bruce Pardo, according to Tina, "was VERY smart but was lacking in common sense." She dated Pardo in the late 1990s for about 6 months, and broke up with him, in part, because "Bad luck followed this guy."

She described Pardo as a "Big Kid," and told me about the trip she took with him to Lake Havasu, Arizona that cinched her decision to break up with him. Calling the whole trip "a cluster f**k of bad luck situations," she illustrated Pardo's bizarre lack of maturity: one of the many disasters plaguing Tina's trip with Bruce was a spill she took into the river. Tina said she almost drowned. Bruce Pardo's reaction? He "laughed...told me it was no big deal." Later in our conversation, she elaborated: "I almost drowned...I was screaming at him and hitting him and he was laughing."

Tina met Bruce Pardo while she was working a part-time job in a liquor store. He'd been coming to the store with another woman, and she "thought he was cute." Pardo drove a red Miata convertible. Tina told me she thought he kept the top down all the time because he was so tall -- perhaps 6'3" or 6'4".

Pardo finally asked her out -- to a Monster Truck show.

She got to know a guy who "liked to have fun" and who was really a "big goof."

When Tina broke up with Bruce after the ill-fated trip to Lake Havasu, she said he took it well and they remained friends. Still, she said, "The Bruce I knew was always being taken advantage of by women."

And at times, he apparently didn't treat them well himself. According to Tina, Bruce Pardo once left a bride standing at the altar. He also told her of breaking off an engagement to another woman "right before" the wedding.

What wasn't clear from our conversation was just how real Bruce Pardo's sense of being screwed over truly was. I asked Tina, "Do you think this was true, that he tended to get with people who wanted to sponge, or is it possible he was a little paranoid?"

She said, "Good question. I think he tended to get with people who weren't as intelligent as he was -- not trying to be derogatory -- he was VERY smart....just didn't have a whole lot of common sense."

Bruce Pardo was, to Tina, a weird man-child who had no feel for how to act like a responsible adult, but she finds his crimes on Christmas Eve unthinkable: "For this entire day," she said, "my mind keeps picturing Bruce as I knew him and trying to place him in that situation and I just can't. I just can't see how he could have gone over the edge so far that he could shoot a little girl in the face like it was nothing....and continue to shoot randomly at people." Tina said she wants to believe that Pardo committed suicide out of remorse, rather than out of it being his last, best choice. "I think the true realization of what he did slammed into him forcing him into reality and he couldn't take what he had done."

"Something snapped inside his brain," Tina said, "so he wasn't Bruce anymore."