Gunman Kills 2 in Hospital in Mission Bay

SAN DIEGO —  A man apparently distraught over the death early Saturday morning of his father at the Mission Bay Memorial Hospital returned with a handgun later in the day and sprayed the emergency room with bullets, police said, killing a nurse and a hospital trainee and wounding two others--a doctor and the father of a patient.

The man identified by police as Bradford Warren Powers Jr., 46, of La Jolla, called police from a pay phone about an hour after the 5 p.m. shooting and turned himself in. Until the call, hospital officials and police had frantically combed though the 150-bed hospital, searching “every crevice and corner” for the gunman and trying to protect other staff members and the 70 patients inside from being harmed.

Nurses screamed at police from a second-floor window. “Are we OK? Are we OK?” they yelled. “We’re very scared! Why aren’t there any police up here?”

Workers inside the kitchen area were kept there for more than an hour as police ran throughout the building, refusing to allow them to leave. “It went on for over an hour and we were locked in there,” said one employee, saying he and the others were terrified at not knowing whether they too might be injured.

Jeffrey Simmons, a hospital spokesman, described the community hospital near San Diego’s Mission Bay resort area as turning instantly into a scene of “madness.”

“All that time we thought he was in the hospital,” Simmons said. “There was such madness that we didn’t even know whether he was in here or not. We tried, you can imagine how we tried, to protect our patients.

“We got the police to check all the rooms and had police actually going through a search of the hospital. We went room to room and looked in every crevice and corner. And we didn’t know (the suspected gunman wasn’t there) until an hour later, when we found out he had been apprehended.”

Shortly after the shooting, about 20 police officers gathered at the entrance of the emergency room and prepared to enter the hospital to conduct a room-to-room search. “Get back, get back--he could still be in there. We advise you to move back,” police shouted to a small group of onlookers who had gathered.

“I’m not going anywhere, my husband is a doctor and he’s in there,” said Regina Whitney. Whitney and her husband had been shopping when her husband had been paged and called to the emergency room to assist after the shooting.

Debbie Burke, a nurse for about five years, was shot in the chest and died during surgery about 90 minutes later at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla.

“We knew when she (Debbie Burke) left that it was critical and there was a chance she wouldn’t make it. And she didn’t,” said police spokesman Dave Cohen.

The medical trainee who was killed was not identified.

Dr. Michael Hughes, an emergency room physician at Mission Bay for the last six months, was reported in stable condition at the Scripps hospital with superficial wounds to the abdomen and thigh.

The second person wounded was identified as Fred Mowrer, 38, an Albuquerque attorney who was visiting San Diego with his wife and daughter. Mowrer had taken his ailing 2-year-old daughter to the Mission Bay emergency room. He was treated for a wound in the buttocks and was scheduled to be released from the hospital late Saturday night. Hospital spokesman Simmons said he believed the suspect had been in the hospital early Saturday morning.

“I believe his father was brought into the emergency room in the middle of the night last night (suffering from) an aneurysm and died of a heart attack shortly thereafter,” Simmons said. “Whether he (the suspected gunman) was there in the hospital with him, we don’t know yet.”

Sgt. Ernest Ullrey of the Oceanside Police Department, about 40 miles north of Mission Bay, said the assailant called his department about 6 p.m. and said he wanted to confess.

“He called our dispatch on the phone and said he was involved in a shooting,” Ullrey said. “He said he was involved in a shooting in San Diego and wanted to turn himself in.”

Ullrey said police units were sent to pick him up at Hill Street and Oceanside Boulevard, where the man had called from a phone booth. San Diego police were notified, Ullrey said, “and based on what they told us about the shooting, we arrested him.”

Asked to describe the suspect, Ullrey would only say: “We don’t know if he was drunk or what his mental thinking may have been.”

At the time of the shooting, there were three nurses, a clerk, a doctor and an emergency medical technician in the emergency room, hospital Executive Director Steve Hall said. The medical technician was there to observe and to learn, he said.

Mission Bay Memorial Hospital, a 14-year-old employee-owned facility run by the Epic Health Care Group, employs 350 physicians and 600 other support personnel, including 175 nurses, Hall said. The hospital serves patients in Pacific Beach, Clairmont and southern La Jolla.

“It’s the first time anything like this has happened,” he said.

Nancy Lloyd, a nurse who has worked at the hospital for almost three years, was one of those summoned to help. Two hours after the shooting, the police had the emergency room barricaded off. Lloyd and others were crying outside.

“Debbie Burke was a good friend of all of us. We all liked her, she was a great lady. I can’t believe she is dead,” said Lloyd, shaking and pale. “I think it is so sad, these people work in the emergency room, they give so much--and now this. I’ve worked in emergency rooms for 20 years and nothing like this has ever happened.”

Other hospital employees were just as stunned.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” sobbed Linda Berek, an emergency room clerk, hugging a paramedic.