Minor Argument Over Ending Visit May Have Caused 2 Deaths

A Huntington Park man who shot his girlfriend and then apparently killed himself Thursday night may have become angry because the woman did not move quickly enough to leave a Buena Park apartment they had been visiting, police said Friday.

Investigators identified the man as 35-year-old Michael Harry Gibson and the woman as Kim Corrine Cave, 25, of Hawaiian Gardens. Gibson, who had a lengthy criminal record, had been released recently from Los Angeles County Jail, police said.

While authorities are awaiting toxicological test results on the dead man and woman, police said drugs apparently were not a factor.

The shootings occurred at about 7:30 p.m. at an apartment in the 7700 block of Fillmore Drive, at the home of a friend that the couple had been visiting for about an hour.

Buena Park police spokesman Rich McMillen said Friday that apparently several adults and children were in the apartment when the shooting began. Gibson, Cave, their two young daughters and a baby remained in the apartment as the rest fled.

Three-Hour Standoff

“It apparently started when he (Gibson) wanted to leave and she wasn’t ready to,” McMillen said. “He got upset because she didn’t get ready fast enough.”

The shooting led to a tense, three-hour standoff before police special weapons teams stormed the apartment at 11:30 p.m. They found Gibson dead outside on a patio, Cave dead on the floor near the kitchen and the three children unharmed.

Two of the children, 1 1/2-year-old Rebecca and 9-month-old Jessica, belonged to the dead couple, while the third child, an infant, belonged to the woman whom the couple had been visiting. She was identified by police as Teresa Whittaker.

Whittaker was able to grab another of her children, a 2-year-old boy, before she ran screaming from the apartment, McMillen said.

Another child belonging to the dead couple, 7-year-old Kevin, was playing with two other children--also believed to be Whittaker’s--away from the apartment when the shooting occurred. Kevin, who also was unharmed, was taken with his younger sisters to the Orangewood Children’s Home, the county’s emergency shelter.

Police said two guns were found at the scene, one inside and another next to the dead man. It had not been determined Friday which guns were fired, McMillen said.

The dead woman sustained at least one gunshot wound in the head, while Gibson died of one self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, police said, adding that two to three shots were fired in all.

But neighbors on Fillmore Drive, a tree-lined street of mostly duplex apartment buildings in the shadow of Knott’s Berry Farm, said they heard three to four shots fired and described a harrowing scene of people fleeing as gunshots rang out and of Cave appearing at a back bedroom window, apparently attempting to escape, before she was shot.

Mary Harris, 75, who lived several doors down from the apartment where the shooting occurred, said she heard what sounded like two firecrackers going off and finally ran out of her house when she heard a woman, believed to be Whittaker, screaming. She added:

“She (Whittaker) had run across the street from the apartment and was kneeling down on the pavement pounding with her fists and screaming, ‘Oh my God, oh my God. My baby, my baby.’ There was a small child standing over her, and then I heard what sounded like another firecracker go off.”

Another neighbor who lives directly across from the apartment, said a man came running from the building screaming, “Run, run, run. He’s got a gun.”

The neighbor said two shots were fired as she ran to the front of her apartment and called police. During the moments before and just as the police arrived, Cave could be seen at the window, the neighbor said.

‘She Never Said Anything’

“We saw her come to the window two or three times, and it looked like she was going to try to climb out,” said the neighbor, who asked that her name not be used. “She never said anything, but each time she went back, maybe because of the children.”

Many people wept as the sound of a child crying rang out from the otherwise quiet apartment during the hours before police stormed the apartment, the neighbor said.

The three children who had been playing away from the apartment, including the dead couple’s son, returned as the standoff continued, the neighbor said. At the request of police, she cared for the children.

“Kevin constantly asked where his mother was and what had happened to her,” she said. “But we didn’t want to tell him anything. When we were able to come back to the house, we were watching television and every time a news flash would come on we’d turn it off. We didn’t want him to find out his mother had been killed that way.”