Los Angeles Man Kills Three Over Laundry Dispute, Then Gets Killed By His Own Son

A Los Angeles man killed three people, including his wife, before being fatally shot by his own son, according to STL Today.

Early reports suggested that the violence was sparked by a beef over a washing machine at the family’s Rowland Heights home when the 54-year-old man, whose identity has not been released by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, used his semiautomatic pistol to kill his 54-year-old wife, his son’s 48-year-old girlfriend and a 27-year-old man who was visiting them. The son then wrestled the gun away from his father and killed him, confirmed the authorities.

Speaking to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Sheriff’s Lt. John Corina said a dispute over laundry between the Los Angeles man and his son’s girlfriend appeared to have triggered off the shooting spree from the former, who has been described as “a heavy drinker with a large gun collection” in the police records.

“It looks like it was a dispute between the dad and the son’s girlfriend, probably over using the washing machine. For some reason, this set the dad off.”

According to officials, soon after the Los Angeles man had finished shooting his bedridden wife, his son’s girlfriend, and the 27-year-old family friend Ernesto Calzadilla, his 33-year-old son, Christopher Morey, somehow managed to wrestle the gun away from him, before fatally shooting his father. It was not immediately clear whether Morey had shot his father once the old man was no longer a threat. But if that’s how it turned out, officials said, then Morey would have to face charges of murder. His bail has been set at $1 million.

Morey had been living at the family’s Rowland Heights residence with his girlfriend and his mother, who was bedridden for well over a few months.

“They had been taking care of her,” Lt. John Corina said. “She was in a hospital bed there in the middle of the living room.”

A friend of the father expressed his condolences to the family, but also said he could understand what could have provoked Morey to shoot him.

“That was his girlfriend (who was shot). That’s why he went all crazy.”

According to KLTV, the Los Angeles man, apart from being a “heavy-drinker” and prone to ill-temper, was also well-recognized by the local police authorities, who had previously visited him on several occasions in regards to various complaints of domestic violence.

Ernesto Calzadilla, one of the victims of the shootings, seems to have been caught up in the ensuing chaos after the Los Angeles man first took to his gun to end the feud he was reportedly having with his son’s girlfriend, Linda. Ernesto’s brother Wilfred Calzadilla said his sibling had stopped going to Morey’s house because of his father’s hostile temperament, but had made an exception on New Year’s Eve because he was close to Morey and Linda.

“Mixing alcohol and guns never ends good,” he said.

2015 has been a rather violent year for Los Angeles, with crime rates and gun-related violence in the city increasing for the first time in 12 years. According to a report by CBS, violent crime spiked about 20 percent in the nation’s second-largest city, while homicides increased by a remarkable 10 percent. This comes after Los Angeles saw a decline in gun-related violence in the early part of the new century compared to the steep numbers of early 1990s.

[Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images]