Marine Held in Killing of Ex-Wife, Daughter : Crime: Decorated Gulf War veteran is also charged with wounding another woman in San Clemente attack.

SAN CLEMENTE —  A decorated U.S. Marine who served in the Persian Gulf War allegedly killed his ex-wife and 5-year-old daughter late Saturday night and wounded another woman in a shooting spree 17 days after his divorce became final.

Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Steven Gibson, 32, burst into his ex-wife’s second-floor apartment and shot her roommate, 32-year-old Wendy Johnson, once in the chest, police said. Gibson then went into a bedroom, where he turned a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol on his daughter, Amber, and ex-wife, Kristina (Tina) Gibson, killing them both, San Clemente Police Lt. Steve Bernardi said.

Johnson’s 8-year-old son, Lucas, was in the apartment throughout the shooting, hidden under bedcovers and apparently unnoticed by Gibson, police said.

“I don’t know how a parent survives losing a child. I’m going to have to learn that,” said Kristina Gibson’s mother, Odile Pullin of Spanaway, Wash., sobbing as she spoke. “You just can’t lose a baby. She was my baby. . . . We were best friends.”

Gibson, who was stationed at Camp Pendleton, was arrested an hour after the shooting while talking to his mother on a pay phone at a Mission Viejo gas station. A cocked, loaded .45-caliber pistol was found on the seat of his blue pickup truck.

Gibson remained secluded Sunday in a one-man cell in the mental health ward of the Orange County Jail, held without bail.

He was booked on suspicion of two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder and is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday in Municipal Court in Laguna Niguel.

The shooting, which erupted about 10:15 p.m. Saturday in the 200 block of Avenida del Poniente, a blufftop neighborhood of duplexes occupied mostly by young families, was the first homicide in the seaside community this year, police said.

“I heard a loud pop and then my neighbor screaming and all sorts of profanity. She came running down the stairs yelling, ‘Call 911!’ ” said Terri Careccia, who lives below Johnson and Gibson.

“I asked her what happened, and she said Jeff shot her. I asked her if it was an accident, and she said, ‘No, he was after Tina,’ ” Careccia said. “Once she lay down on my kitchen floor, she was out of it, really pale.”

Johnson, who was shot once in the chest, suffered injuries to her liver, diaphragm and lung, and was listed in serious but stable condition at Mission Community Hospital in Mission Viejo on Sunday after surgery.

Johnson, a secretary and bookkeeper, refused interviews via a hospital spokesman Sunday.

Kristina Gibson’s relatives and neighbors said her marriage was rocky from the start, with arguments escalating into violence every few months.

Kristina Gibson reported the abuse to the Marine Corps and tried to get it to issue restraining orders, her mother said. She said that military police reprimanded Jeffrey Gibson and provided counseling.

Marine Capt. Ralph Mills said he was unsure whether any restraining orders had been issued. He said there is no punitive action pending against Gibson.

“We knew he was an unusual person, perhaps violent,” Bob Kleinsteuber, a neighbor of Kristina Gibson, said Sunday. “He had damaged her car, slashed her tires a couple of times. But we never thought anything like this would happen.”

The Gibsons split up last July and their divorce became final May 12, family members said. Last weekend, over dinner to celebrate her 26th birthday, Kristina Gibson told her ex-husband she had started dating another man.

“They never really maintained a good relationship. If he failed, he took it out on her,” Pullin said. “(The family is) all kind of gathering now and not believing this could happen. I think I’m a little bit numb.”

Kristina Gibson grew up in suburban Tacoma, Wash., where she was a straight-A student and swam on the high school team. She met Jeffrey Gibson in May, 1986, when she went on a monthlong vacation to visit her brother at a Marine base in Bermuda.

Jeffrey Gibson, a career Marine who enlisted in 1981, was the platoon sergeant and a buddy of Kristina’s brother.

“They ended up together. They went off and went dancing. That was the start of the relationship,” Leslie Peterson, Kristina’s brother, remembered.

Kristina canceled her plans to attend Washington State University and stayed on in Bermuda. On New Year’s Eve, 1986, she married Jeffrey Gibson in his native Long Island, N.Y.

The violence began while the couple lived in Bermuda during the early months of their marriage, family members said.

One year, after he celebrated their wedding anniversary drunk and alone, Jeffrey Gibson threatened Kristina with a gun, Pullin said.

Another time, Pullin added, Gibson threw his wife up against a wall, breaking a hole in it.

“It took two years for the Marine Corps to say this boy had a problem,” Pullin said angrily. “I’m mad. I’m damn mad at the Marine Corps. This boy needed help and they didn’t provide it. It was right under their nose.”

Gibson has received three good conduct medals and three stars for overseas tours of 90 days or more, according to Mills. He spent four months in the Middle East serving as a team leader in Operation Desert Storm, earning a Navy medal for valor, along with several other combat awards, Mills said.

But Peterson claimed that Gibson also was violent with his troops. He said he once saw Gibson bash the head of a drunk, handcuffed sailor against the floor.

In October, 1987, Kristina Gibson fled the Marine base for her mother’s home in Spanaway. But when she discovered she was pregnant, she decided to rejoin her husband. Gibson was assigned to Camp Pendleton, and after Amber’s birth--on May 21, 1988, Kristina’s 21st birthday--the family was reunited.

“That was her best birthday present in the whole world, when she had Amber,” Pullin said. “She was a wonderful mother. Her life mainly revolved around her daughter.”

Kristina Gibson left her husband again last July. Last fall, she answered Wendy Johnson’s ad seeking a roommate, and soon moved into the duplex on Avenida del Poniente, a crowded neighborhood half a block from the beach.

Kristina Gibson had recently started dating a colleague at the aeronautic import-export company where she worked as a secretary, and they were planning a weekend trip to Las Vegas, family members said.

Jeffrey Gibson saw his daughter every other weekend, and at Amber’s birthday party in a neighborhood park last weekend, he took pictures and bought pizza for everyone, said Careccia, Kristina Johnson’s neighbor.

Kristina and Amber Gibson will be buried in Washington state, relatives said.

“I’m in shock, I guess. I’m just confused. I don’t know what to think or say. I miss my sister,” Peterson said.

“What did Amber ever do?” he asked. “She’s his own daughter, that’s the part that blows me away, that’s the part that I can’t fathom. It makes no sense in any way, shape or form to me. I can’t imagine what was going through his head.”

Times staff writer Thuan Le contributed to this report.