Features

Bodies found inside gunman’s home were parents

The Associated Press
Saturday June 08, 2002

LONG BEACH – A gunman may have staged a deadly grocery store rampage out of fear that someone was about to find his parents’ mummified bodies in his home, police said Friday. 

Antonio Pineiro, a 48-year-old schizophrenic who lived behind the market, detailed his plans in rambling journal entries that were found after he was shot to death by police last month. 

The mummified bodies of Maria Llufrio, 69, and Pineiro’s stepfather Antonio Llufrio, 68, were found on a bed, police spokeswoman Nancy Tabing said. 

A bloodstained carpenter’s hammer was found next to the bed and apparently had been used to kill them two years ago, police said in a statement. 

Investigators also found several Polaroid photographs of the decomposed bodies, dated April 2001, Lt. Bill Blair said. 

“The word ’macabre’ doesn’t do it justice,” Blair said 

Pineiro went to the Top Valu market on May 31 and opened fire with two handguns, killing a clerk and an 8-year-old girl and wounding four others before officers killed him in a shootout. 

In the journal, Pineiro indicated he planned to kill people at the market. Handwritten and typewritten notes stated: “The last day before the shooting, May 2002” and “The day of the shooting May 30, 2002, Top Valu.” 

He also used the term “balacera,” a Spanish term that loosely translates to “many shots,” the police statement said. 

Investigators believe Pineiro’s attack plans may have been “accelerated” by a pending fumigation of his building, the statement added. 

The fumigation had been planned for this week. 

“Each unit would have been inspected and would have resulted in the discovery of the bodies” of his parents, Tabing said.