Ex-Employee Kills Firm’s Co-Owner, Officials Say

CAMARILLO —  A disgruntled former employee of a Camarillo computer software firm shot and killed the company’s co-owner Wednesday afternoon before turning the gun on himself, sheriff’s officials said.

Sheldon Snyder, 36, died at the scene. The suspect, 29-year-old Mikhail Khaimchayev, was airlifted to St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard, where he was in critical condition with a bullet wound to the stomach, Ventura County Sheriff’s Department officials said.

Khaimchayev, a Los Angeles resident, was in surgery Wednesday night and was expected to live, a hospital spokeswoman said. His mother and brother, along with two armed sheriff’s deputies, were waiting in the hospital lobby. Family members refused to discuss the shooting.

The incident started shortly after 2 p.m. when Khaimchayev walked into the offices of Postal Innovations at 5251 Verdugo Way, went to Snyder’s office and shot him several times with a handgun, deputies said.

Sheriff’s Capt. Keith Parks said Khaimchayev was fired about a month ago and had returned Wednesday to ask for his job back. It was not known how long the suspect had worked for the company, which designs computer hardware and software for a number of clients, including the U.S., Argentine and Taiwanese postal services, IBM, Lockheed-Martin, Loral Corp. and Unisys Corp.

Postal Innovations uses a series of first-floor offices in a two-story beige building in a large industrial park just east of the Ventura Freeway. Several other technology companies have offices in the same building.

After hearing gunfire, several Postal Innovation employees who were in other offices fled to a neighboring business, deputies said.

“They heard shots and they were fleeing to use the phone,” said Laurie Graves-Abraham, an employee at Mintronix, a business in the same building where the first 911 call was made.

Graves-Abraham didn’t hear the shots and thought, at first, the employees from next door were overreacting. “That kind of stuff doesn’t happen here. That’s why I moved here,” she said.

Detectives did not say how many times Khaimchayev fired his gun, but Sheriff’s Sgt. Chuck Buttell said: “As the person was reporting the call, the 911 operator was actually hearing the shots being fired.”

Initial emergency sheriff’s radio broadcasts indicated that between eight and 10 people had been shot but when deputies arrived they found only Snyder and Khaimchayev in a first-floor office.

There were 12 employees on duty at Postal Innovations at the time of the shooting. The workers were escorted to an adjacent office building that houses the Ventura County superintendent of schools offices, where they were interviewed by detectives and allowed to telephone family members.

The county Fire Department’s chaplain and a sheriff’s psychologist were called in to talk with several distraught employees.

“Some of them are pretty shook up. We are doing the best we can to calm them down,” Buttell said.

One male Postal Innovations employee said: “They can prepare you for earthquakes and fires, but nothing prepares you for this.”

Minutes after the shooting, two hospital helicopters, a Sheriff’s Department chopper and a dozen patrol cars descended on the industrial park, which is about three blocks from Camarillo High School.

The commotion prompted several people who live in homes near the east side of the industrial park and more than 50 employees from surrounding businesses to flock to the crime scene.

“This is usually such a quiet neighborhood that I have never felt any fear,” resident Karen Koosmann said. “This upsets me very much. It’s got me quite shaken.”

Kyle Schwieters, an employee of Beeper City, whose building shares a courtyard with Postal Innovations, said he was listening to the radio at the time and did not hear the shooting.

“I just looked out the window and saw a bunch of cops running in with their guns,” he said.

Several dozen workers from a Blue Cross insurance office nearby took early afternoon breaks and watched the investigation unfold from behind yellow crime scene tape, but employees at the county schools building were told to stay inside.

“Some people in our offices downstairs said they heard several shots,” said Supt. Charles Weis. “They called me out of a meeting and told me I had to help calm people down, so I did.”

At the time of the shooting, Weis was in a workshop for school principals in a boardroom about 150 feet from the shooting scene.

Authorities released little information about Snyder, who was a software engineer, except to say that he lived in a gated condominium community in Simi Valley and had co-owned the 2-year-old company with another man.

Snyder’s next of kin are his father, also a Simi resident, and his mother, who lives in Pennsylvania, Parks said.

Records from the secretary of state’s office indicate that Thousand Oaks resident Steven S. Simone is listed as president of Postal Innovations, which also has offices in Washington, D.C., and Raleigh, N.C.

“I don’t know what you can say about how horrible this is. Obviously, we are very upset,” said a woman who identified herself as Simone’s wife at the couple’s Thousand Oaks home.

Times staff writers Coll Metcalfe, Tracy Wilson, Daryl Kelley and Kate Folmar and Times Community News reporters Anna Gorman and Massie Ritsch contributed to this story.