UPDATE: Orange County District Attorney levels charges; suspect's telling MySpace page . . .
The Orange County District Attorney today charged the man arrested in Las Vegas in the shooting and killing Sunday of a Westminster woman and critical injuring of her boyfriend with special circumstances murder.
The DA's office also further identified Pasqual Raul Loera as an unemployed, 32-year-old U.S. Army Navy deserter out of Redlands. Westminster Police had earlier said their suspect resided in El Cajon, but later revised that to say it was believed his family lives there.
Loera shot the couple after posing as a potential buyer of the black Infiniti that were selling to raise money to retire, according to the DA. He is accused of crashing the couple's Infiniti after a police chase in Nevada.
According to Loera's MySpace page, which features many photos of him admiring sports cars at an auto show, his occupation is listed as “Crash Test Dummy.”
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The Westminster Police Department also today released these booking photos Loera, who was awaiting extradition from Nevada at press time.
Late Sunday afternoon, Westminster cops received a
call from the Las Vegas Metro Police Department about a man they had in
custody. He had been seen bleeding from the leg near a Primm, Nevada, casino, where he fled from security.
After a short chase that
ended with the man crashing the black Infiniti he was driving into a ditch, he was
apprehended and turned over to Las Vegas police.
It turned out Loera, the man in custody, was suffering from a gunshot wound to his leg and the Infiniti was
registered to someone residing in the 5000 block of Duncannon Avenue in Westminster.
The
Vegas cops suggested the local cops check the address. There, Westminster police made a grisly discovery. Julie Palasco, 48, was dead from gunshot wounds, and her boyfriend, Dennis Koire, 49, was clinging to life after being shot himself. He was rushed to a local hospital in grave condition.
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The two-story residence where the victims lived had been ransacked,
according to Van Woodson, the Westminster Police public information officer.
Neighbors told the KTLA Morning News that the couple
who lived at the home had a black Infiniti for sale, the proceeds from
which were to help them ease into retirement.
Loera is now charged
with one felony count of special circumstances murder and one felony
count of attempted murder. The special circumstances include murder
during the commission of robbery and burglary.
“The investigation is ongoing,” according to an OCDA statement, which asks anyone with additional information to contact Supervising District Attorney Investigator Ed
Berakovich at (714) 347-8492 and/or Westminster Police Department Detective Alan Aoki at (714)
548-3733.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Sonia Balleste of the Homicide Unit is prosecuting the case.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.