2 Dead, Firm’s Owner Shot in Latest Rampage

SANTA FE SPRINGS — The industrial area of Santa Fe Springs became a place of gunfire and death for the second time this month when an Orange County man returned Friday to the embroidery firm from which he had recently been fired, shooting and critically wounding his former business partner before killing the man’s sister and finally himself, officials said.

Angered by his fall from grace at Yoonimex Inc., Soon Byung Park walked into Edward Yoon’s office with a handgun shortly before 11 a.m., police said.

Officers said he fired at Yoon, 46, who was sitting behind his desk, striking him in the back, then turned and blocked the path of Yoon’s sister, Mee Hwa Hong of Fullerton, as she tried to flee.

“She got down on her knees in front of the suspect and he shot her execution-style,” once in the chest and once in the back of the head, Whittier Police Officer Chuck Drylie said.

Park, 36, went outside, emptied his spent rounds, reloaded his .38-caliber revolver and drove his car to a nearby company building, investigators said. He walked inside and, as a worker ran from him, shot himself in the head.

The scene was painfully similar to last week’s shooting at another Santa Fe Springs plant, Omni Plastics, where a factory inspector killed two colleagues and wounded four others because he thought co-workers were taunting him. Daniel S. Marsden, 38, later turned the gun on himself in front of stunned onlookers on a South-Central Los Angeles corner and fatally shot himself.

“Everybody’s saying, ‘Same city, what’s going on?’ ” Drylie said. “This is something highly unusual. The reasons are different. They could have happened miles apart, cities apart. . . . It is a tragedy, and I have no explanation for it.”

Outside a warehouse in the industrial complex where Friday’s shooting took place, Dorothy Rietkerk nervously smoked a cigarette, flanked by a dozen other employees. “Everybody’s scared,” said the receiving clerk, noting that the complex was the scene of still another shooting rampage three years ago.

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“We’re to the point where we’re wondering if we should get come-back pay,” she said, questioning if it was safe to return to work.

Another worker, Lamont Spence, 34, said he has noticed that people have started to look at the door when someone walks in: “You start to wonder if someone is going to come in and blow you away.”

Police said Park helped Yoon found the firm, also known as U.S. Embroidery Co., about four years ago, and at some point lived in Yoon’s home in Aliso Viejo. In recent months, however, the partnership had soured.

Problems with Park’s performance apparently prompted Yoon, the owner, to demote Park and transfer him to the firm’s second building in the complex, investigators said. About a month ago, Park was fired.

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“He was on the outs--no job, no money,” Drylie said. “He notices his business partner had a new car, a new house. They started out evenly and now they weren’t.”

George Dalou, a salesman with the company who returned to the plant shortly after the shooting, said Park had threatened violence after he was fired.

“When they laid him off, he went to a family member of the owner and said he would come back, kill the owner and commit suicide. And he did it,” Dalou said incredulously.

Last month, a company official filed a report with Whittier police, who handle crimes in Santa Fe Springs, stating that Park had been threatening to hurt employees and might kill himself. But Lt. David Carlisle said police had been unable to locate Park.

The company official knew that Park lived with a teenage son, but did not know how to get in touch with him. “In hindsight, we wish we would have had some way to find this guy and prevent this problem,” Carlisle said.

Susan Lang, who at one time worked for the company, said Park was a quiet man who immigrated to the United States in 1993 and spoke little English. Lang said she and Park worked together at Yoon’s Orange County plant before he moved the business to Santa Fe Springs.

Park designed embroidery patterns at the company and owned some of the machinery, while Yoon ran the business end, she said.

Park was unhappy because of problems with his marriage, Lang said. His wife lives in Korea.

“He was a good man,” she said, “but unhappy.”

Dalou also described Park, who he said had earned $6,500 a month at the firm, as “a good man.”

“His problem was that he was an alcoholic,” Dalou said.

“This world is so scary. You don’t know who you’re talking to,” said Dalou, who added that the firm had recently hired a security guard to patrol the plant at night, but not during the day.

Hong, Yoon’s slain sister, moved to Orange County from Chicago in 1993, was divorced and had no children, Lang said. She worked as a receptionist at Yoon’s business.

Dalou called Yoon “the best,” saying that he encouraged his employees and paid them well. “I would never find a boss like him,” Dalou said.

Yoon, who Dalou said has two teenage children, was airlifted to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, where he was in serious but stable condition after four hours of surgery to remove a bullet and repair organ damage, said Dr. Bruce E. Stabile, chief of the hospital’s department of surgery.

The bullet penetrated Yoon’s diaphragm, liver, colon and one of his kidneys, Stabile said. Stabile said the wounds are potentially life-threatening and Yoon’s prognosis is guarded.

Hong, 40, was pronounced dead at Whittier Hospital Medical Center.

“She was one of the nicest people I met in my whole life,” Dalou said.

Hong’s husband, Eui Nam Hong, 53, said they have one son, who recently graduated from high school. He said he was too depressed to talk.

“It is not a good time,” he said.

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Friday was the third time in recent years that deadly violence has erupted in Santa Fe Springs, a small city in southeast Los Angeles County that is more industrial than residential.

In 1994, an ex-employee of Extron Electronics who had been dismissed for “unsatisfactory performance” shot and killed three former co-workers and wounded two others before fatally shooting himself. Last week, there were the shootings at Omni. And now, the attacks at Yoonimex.

Like many others in the town, Santa Fe Springs Mayor George Minnehan makes a clear-cut distinction between his city’s after-hours personality and the one it presents by day.

At night, he said, the city assumes the role of a small town with a close-knit population of just 15,500, people who take walks and play catch on safe, quiet streets.

But during working hours, Santa Fe Springs is a far different place, says the 60-year-old mayor: That’s when its population shoots up to 100,000--mostly industrial workers who toil indoors and call somewhere else home.

“These aren’t the real residents of our city you’re talking about,” Minnehan said of the various gunmen. “They’re the industrial workers. Our residents are like one big happy family. Everybody gets along. We’re like a Midwestern town in the shadow of the big city.”

The recent killings have taken place at the very core of Santa Fe Springs’ industrial heart, where most of its newly paved streets are flanked by squat concrete buildings.

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Friday’s shooting occurred about five miles from Omni, where police say Marsden became enraged because co-workers were mocking him and saying he was gay.

At the Anchor Co., an industrial solvent firm not far from Yoonimex, work went on quietly Friday afternoon.

June Fernandez, a company secretary, speculated that the streak of workplace mayhem was tied to the sheer size of Santa Fe Springs’ industrial area.

“Santa Fe Springs is such a huge industrial area. The odds are greater that something like this would happen here,” Fernandez said. “But I don’t feel it has anything to do with the city. Santa Fe Springs should not get a bad rap.”

In the last 30 years, Santa Fe Springs has worked to build a reputation of a different sort.

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Once dotted with more than 2,000 oil wells, the city has attempted to replace its image as an aging oil town with a more contemporary one of attractive commercial development.

“Our city fathers had the foresight to see where to go,” said Minnehan, who has lived in Santa Fe Springs since 1964. “They could see that industry was king, that it was the backbone of a community. It’s what moves your city ahead.”

But with big industry come outside workers and outside problems.

“This kind of violence could have happened anywhere,” he said. “The problem isn’t with Santa Fe Springs but with society as a whole. The courts have taken the teeth out of the laws. There’s no fear for the law anymore.

“Unfortunately we’ve had a few problems here,” Minnehan said. “But this city has a 40-year history and things like this are just real rare. Now it’s just our luck that we’ve had them happen one after the other.”

Times staff writers Randal C. Archibold, Bettina Boxall, John Glionna and Zahida Hafeez and correspondent Kay Rhee Harrigan contributed to this story.