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| A picture of the suspect entering Santa Monica College Library is seen as Jacqueline Seabrook, Chief of Santa Monica Police department speaks during a news conference Saturday June 8, 2013, in Santa Monica, Calif., to discuss more information regarding the suspect in the shooting that left five people dead, including the shooter, near Santa Monica College on Friday. |
SANTA MONICA,
Calif. (AP) -- A woman who was critically wounded in last week's
Santa Monica shooting rampage died Sunday, bringing the total number of
victims killed by the gunman to five.
Marcela
Franco, 26, died of her injuries at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center,
according to Santa Monica College spokeswoman Tricia Ramos.
Franco
had been a passenger in a Ford Explorer driven by her father, campus
groundskeeper Carlos Navarro Franco, 68, who also was killed in Friday's
attack.
Investigators trying to determine why
the gunman planned the shooting spree were focusing on a deadly act of
domestic violence that touched off the mayhem.
The
heavily armed man's attack against his own family at their home led to
the violence in Santa Monica streets, lasting just a matter of minutes
until he was shot to death in a chaotic scene at the college library by
police.
Investigators were looking at family
connections to find a motive because the killer's father and brother
were the first victims, an official briefed on the probe who requested
anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly told The
Associated Press.
The killer, who died a day
shy of his 24th birthday, was connected to a home that went up in flames
after the first shootings, said police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks.
Police
were not naming the shooter or the two men found dead in the house
because next of kin was out of the country and hadn't been notified.
Neighbors and colleagues of the boys' mother said she was visiting
family in Lebanon.
SWAT team officers searched
the mother's Los Angeles apartment and officers interviewed neighbors
about the son who lived with her, said Beverly Meadows who lives in the
adjoining unit.
Public records show that
Meadows' neighbor is Randa Abdou, 54, the ex-wife of Samir Zawahri and
former co-owner of the house where the first shooting took place.
Abdou
was wasn't expected home for another week, Meadows said. It wasn't
clear if the son who lived with Abdou was a victim or the suspected
gunman.
Zawahri, 55, brought his family to the
neighborhood of small homes and apartment buildings tucked up against
Interstate 10 in the mid-1990s, according to property records.
Not
long after arriving on Yorkshire Avenue, the couple went through a
difficult divorce and split custody of their two boys, said Thomas
O'Rourke, a neighbor.
When the sons got older, one went to live with his mother while the other stayed with the father.
Standing
next to the weapons and ammo found at multiple crime scenes, Seabrooks
said at a Saturday news conference that the "cowardly murderer" planned
the attack and was capable of firing 1,300 rounds.
The
killer had a run-in with police seven years ago, but Seabrooks wouldn't
offer more details because he was a juvenile at the time.
The gunman was enrolled at Santa Monica College in 2010, Seabrooks said.
After
neighbors watched in shock as he shot at his father's house and it went
up in flames, he opened fire on a woman driving by, wounding her, and
then carjacked another woman.
He directed her
to drive to the college, ordering her stop along the way to shoot at a
city bus and people on the street. Two people on the bus were injured.
Police
had received multiple 911 calls by the time the mayhem shifted to the
college, a two-year school with about 34,000 students located more than a
mile inland from the city's famous pier, promenade and expansive, sandy
beaches.
On campus, he opened fired on a Ford
Explorer driven by Navarro Franco, who plowed through a brick wall into
a faculty parking lot.
Joe Orcutt heard
gunshots and went to see what happened in the parking lot. He said he
saw the Explorer in the brick wall and was looking for the shooter when,
suddenly, there he was 30 feet away firing at people like it was target
practice.
The gunman then moved on foot
across campus, firing away. Students were seen leaping out windows of a
classroom building and running for their lives. Others locked themselves
behind doors or bolted out of emergency exits.
Trena
Johnson, who works in the dean's office, heard gunshots and looked out
the window and saw a man in black with a "very large gun" shoot a woman
in the head outside the library. That victim was transported to a
hospital, where she died.
At some point,
police say the gunman dropped an Adidas duffel bag loaded with
ammunition magazines, boxes of bullets and a .44 revolver. Police also
found a small cache of ammunition in a room in the burned-out house.
Surveillance
photos showed the gunman in black strolling past a cart of books into
the library with an assault-style rifle by his side.
The
shooter fired at least 70 rounds in the library. Miraculously, no one
was injured until two Santa Monica police officers and a campus cop
arrived and took out the shooter.
