One of the creepiest pieces of news about mass-murderer Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, an aerospace software technician who lived in Montrose, among Los Angeles' most charming, quiet and friendly suburban neighborhoods, was that he lost his “beloved” dog, Saki, to the estranged wife Pardo so viciously and methodically killed on Christmas Eve.

Was losing his brown Akita dog the final push that sent this increasingly unbalanced man secretly and quietly over the edge, causing him to wipe out nine innocent lives, giving Los Angeles the kind of global and national press it doesn't exactly hope for?

Here's the timeline: Pardo was ordered by a Los Angeles Superior Court in June to begin paying $1,785 to $3,166 in monthly alimony (the Associated Press says the lower amount, the L.A. Times the higher amount), but Pardo was just two or three weeks later fired from a very lucrative $120,000-plus job at ITT Electronic Systems – Radar Systems in Van Nuys. Then, he was just a couple of weeks after that denied the usual state unemployment benefits because of the still-unknown nature of his July firing from ITT Electronic Systems. And then — one week before his blazing, bloody rampage in Covina — the apparently financially wiped out Pardo was ordered by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to pay his wife, Sylvia, an additional $10,000, and hand over to her his Akita dog, Saki. 

If that was the final straw that caused Bruce Pardo to lose his mind and kill nine innocent adults and children in a blaze of gunfire and high-octane racing fuel, the next media story on this gruesome affair should look at the superior court judge, what the judge decided in this ruinous divorce case, and why he decided it.

Nobody can foresee the beginnings of insanity. Nobody knows what happens when somebody believes they have lost everything. Maybe that is what happened in the demented mind of Bruce Jeffrey Pardo. A Google search of the words “murder divorce” turns up more than 8 million references.

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