Law enforcement authorities Tuesday were trying to determine exactly what happened as a police captain and his Westminster city clerk girlfriend were found shot to death in his Seal Beach apartment following a tense hours-long SWAT team deployment.
There was no confirmation from authorities that the deaths were the result of a murder-suicide, but a neighbor described their relationship as “volatile.”
It’s possible both people were already dead when the SWAT team arrived.
Police were called about 7:20 p.m. Sunday. A desperate, screaming woman had called an emergency phone line for help, but then the line went dead, according to Seal Beach police Sgt. Michael Henderson. Witnesses told police they heard several gunshots coming from an apartment in the 100 block of Seventh Street in Seal Beach, he said.
SWAT officers surrounded the apartment in case it was a barricade situation, Henderson said. But the two people inside may already have been dead.
When numerous attempts to contact someone inside the apartment failed, the SWAT team entered the residence and found the bodies of 37-year-old Amanda Jensen of Garden Grove and 49-year-old Rick Moore, Henderson said.
Jensen was Westminster’s city clerk and Moore was a Los Alamitos police captain, according to Seal Beach police.
A neighbor who lives and works as a maintenance man at the 21-unit apartment complex told reporters that Moore had lived there for about four months and described the relationship between the two as “volatile.”
[symple_googlemap title=”Seal Beach SWAT” location=”100 Seventh Street, Seal Beach, CA” height=”300″ zoom=”15″]
— City News Service