- Sylvia Ortega and Bruce Pardo divorced after just two years of marriage. Bruce was ordered to pay spousal support, but lost his job as an electrical engineer five months later
- Six days after their divorce was finalised, Bruce showed up at Sylvia’s parents’ Christmas Eve celebration
- Dressed as Santa, Bruce carried out a mass shooting at the party, killing nine before an explosion set the house on fire
When Bruce Pardo and Sylvia Ortega married, their future looked bright.
Bruce, a well-paid electrical engineer, owned a lovely house just up the hill from the Catholic church where he volunteered as an usher.
After the wedding, Sylvia moved in, along with her five-year-old daughter.
Bruce and Sylvia had started seeing each other a few years before tying the knot.
Aged 39 when she met Bruce, then 41, Sylvia had three children from a previous relationship.
But cracks began to emerge in the couple’s relationship and by 2007, a year after they wed, Sylvia was sleeping in the spare room and spending weekends with her parents.
Then, just after Bruce and Sylvia’s second wedding anniversary, Sylvia told her husband she wanted a divorce.
‘The situation has become untenable, and continuing the marriage was not an option,’ Sylvia said in court documents.
During the divorce proceedings, Bruce was ordered to pay Sylvia’s legal fees and provide her with a monthly support payment.
Sylvia claimed Bruce was churning through the couple’s savings, moving money out of their shared account and into his own private account.
Matters only got worse when, five months after Sylvia filed for divorce, Bruce lost his job.
He’d racked up $50,000 in credit card debt and was paying $4000 a month in mortgage repayments.
Now it was his turn to file for spousal support, but the request was denied, and Bruce was legally required to send money to Sylvia.
His life was undeniably in disarray.
But no-one could have predicted the monstrous and calculated behaviour that followed.
On Christmas Eve, 2008, six days after their divorce finalised, Sylvia was at her parents’ house for a family get-together.
Shortly before midnight, there was a knock at the door.
An eight-year-old girl opened the door to a man in a Santa suit – wielding a gun.
A gunshot hit the girl in the face as the attacker stormed into the house, firing bullets.
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The girl’s mother, Sylvia’s sister Leticia, managed to escape with her daughter and called emergency.
‘I need someone to come over and help my daughter,’ she screamed, according to a transcript obtained by the LA Times.
Bruce had driven to Sylvia’s parents’ Californian house in a hired car, armed with four handguns.
He was also carrying a large package in Christmas gift wrapping that contained a compressor filled with racing fuel.
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After firing mercilessly at Sylvia, her parents and her siblings, Bruce sprayed the highly-flammable liquid around the house.
The fuel made contact with an open flame, causing an explosion that sent the entire house up in flames.
Seeing the house ablaze, neighbours called for help.
Ambulances, firefighters and police arrived to a scene of chaos and carnage.
The bodies of the dead were so badly charred from the fire that it took the coroner several days to identify them.
The family home was devastated by the fire and had to be bulldozed.
Later that same night, police were also called to a house where a man was dead.
It was Bruce Pardo.
In his car they found the remains of a Santa suit and explosives.
‘We never saw this coming. We never thought this would ever happen,’ Bruce’s brother, Brad, told the LA Times.
Surviving members of the family confirmed it was Pardo who’d fired on them.
Investigators later discovered that Pardo had a detailed getaway plan.
He had a flight booked to Canada and had strapped about $25,000 to his body before donning the Santa suit.
But the fire had been fast and ferocious, and Pardo was badly injured with third-degree burns.
Parts of the Santa suit had melted to his body.
So, instead of fleeing the country, Pardo drove 60 kilometres to his brother’s house, where he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Bruce, 45, had murdered nine people, including his ex-wife, Sylvia, 43, her 80-year-old father, Joseph Ortega, and 70-year-old mum, Alicia.
He also killed Sylvia’s two brothers, Charles and James Ortega, their wives, Cheri and Teresa, Sylvia’s sister, Alicia Ortiz, and Alicia’s 17-year-old son Michael.
Three other people were injured, including the girl who opened the door, but thankfully they survived.
Sylvia’s three children were at the house at the time of the mass murder, but they too survived.
Bruce’s violent pre-Christmas outburst was a shock to everyone.
‘You don’t want that anger to live within you day to day and grow, just like it did with this monster,’ she said.
He had no criminal record, and according to the couple’s divorce lawyers, Sylvia had never mentioned fearing that her husband might resort to violence.
‘We never saw this coming. We never thought this would ever happen,’ Bruce’s brother, Brad, told the LA Times.
It was later found that Pardo had been planning the assault for months, having bought ammunition and ordering the Santa suit months before.
In 2016 Sylvia’s only surviving sibling, Leticia, said on Oprah Where Are They Now that, following the horror her brother-inlaw inflicted on the family, she’d chosen not to follow a path of anger and hate.
‘You don’t want that anger to live within you day to day and grow, just like it did with this monster,’ she said.
‘Love is the most powerful energy.’
