The Briefing Room
General Category => National/Breaking News => Topic started by: 240B on December 30, 2017, 03:12:21 am
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Los Angeles Times
By NICOLE SANTA CRUZ, SEEMA MEHTA and ANDREA CASTILLO
DEC 29, 2017
A workplace shooting just before 2:30 p.m. in a quiet neighborhood of Long Beach on Friday left two men dead, including the shooter, officials said.
Long Beach police said they went to a law office in the Bixby Knolls neighborhood amid reports of an active shooter at large. They said they found multiple casualties but it was no longer considered an active shooting scene.
(more)
http://beta.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-long-beach-shooting-20171229-story.html
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Allegedly, the shooter was once an employee of the Law Firm of Larry H. Parker. According to the firm's website, it specializes in plaintiff's personal injury litigation (car accidents, exposure to toxic chemicals and such) and it has offices in several locations in California and Arizona.
Having once worked for lawyers, I can tell you it's a very stressful profession. Plaintiffs' attorneys are particularly under stress. Usually they have huge case loads since, for the most part, they operate on a contingent fee basis -- that is, if they don't win or obtain a settlement, they don't get paid. To make any money, these lawyers need a high number of cases and they have to win far more than most lawyers in order to stay in business. It's a wonder there aren't more such shootings. Not too many people can handle the pressure.
The firm's website:
https://www.larryhparker.com/ (https://www.larryhparker.com/)
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Christmas Party. He went in shooting. Apparently he knew who it was he wanted to kill.
No random act, as far as I can tell at the moment.
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Updated story. Apparently, the shooting took place at another firm, not the Parker firm previously identified:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-long-beach-shooting-20171230-story.html (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-long-beach-shooting-20171230-story.html)
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The one lawyer was being "ousted", so in short, it was a murder-suicide I heard, murder against the boss.
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So was this a Lawyer on Lawyer thing? If so sounds like a good start at reducing the undesirables.
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The one lawyer was being "ousted", so in short, it was a murder-suicide I heard, murder against the boss.
Not sure the victim was the "boss" in that he and the shooter were partners in the firm. Usually, in a partnership, all of the other partners have to vote a partner out. But maybe the shooter blamed this partner over the others? Who knows?
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Good area. Virginia Country Club, old money.
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Senior Partner, he was the boss or the guy would have gone gunning for other "partners".
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Senior Partner, he was the boss or the guy would have gone gunning for other "partners".
The other guy who was wounded was also a partner.
We're just all guessing here -- armchair detectives. We may never know the whole story.
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The founder of the firm was shot: http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CALIFORNIA_SHOOTING_THE_LATEST?SITE=INKEN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CALIFORNIA_SHOOTING_THE_LATEST?SITE=INKEN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT)
“I am heartbroken!†wrote Kim Scheffler Smith on Facebook. “Major Langer was not only my boss for 23 years but a faithful friend, a man of integrity with a big bark but a very soft heart. Please pray for his family, and for Ron Beck who was wounded, and everyone who works there. What an awful ordeal to go through. He touched countless lives as an attorney. I just can’t believe it. What is wrong with this world?â€
http://heavy.com/news/2017/12/major-langer-long-beach-law-firm-shooting-victim-ron-beck/ (http://heavy.com/news/2017/12/major-langer-long-beach-law-firm-shooting-victim-ron-beck/)
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@TomSea
Ms. Smith is not listed as an attorney with the firm, so I gather she is a secretary, paralegal or some other member of the firm's support staff. As such, Mr. Langer would be her boss. In the firms I worked for as a secretary, I had two attorneys as my immediate supervisors, but really, I worked for all the attorneys, particularly the partners. Support staff worked for the whole firm.
I suppose as managing partner, Mr. Langer had overall responsibility for hiring and firing of attorneys in the firm. But depending on the partnership setup, he may have needed approval of the rest of the partners in order to drive out one of the partners. That might have been why Mendoza also shot the other partner, Mr. Beck. I don't know what was going on in Mendoza's mind, but he seemed to have more than one specific target in mind -- not just Mr. Langer.
But like I said, we're doing some armchair sleuthing (more like "guessing" here). I really don't want to argue.