The weapon

Forty shots in three bursts from a high-velocity rifle. Three people dead, two hurt. Cops pinned behind their bullet-pocked patrol car. Helicopters in the sky, SWAT team snipers on a roof.

It’s 20 minutes past 4 on a Saturday afternoon in Pasadena, a city of 139,000 known for the Rose Bowl, the annual Tournament of Roses Parade and tree-lined streets of Craftsman bungalows.

The place evokes trendy pacifists, not barricaded gunmen.

The phone starts ringing at Pasadena Police headquarters:

“911, what is your emergency?”

“There’s gunshots in front of my house.”

The caller says she doesn’t see anyone on the street.

A second caller: “There’s a shooting in the 1700 block of Summit.”

“How many gunshots did you hear?”

“At least 15.”

The 1700 block of Summit Avenue, on the northwest edge of town, is a little more hardscrabble than much of Pasadena. There are gangs here, and the working-class residents have heard gunfire before. In the next block, a 4-year-old boy was paralyzed in March 2013; police, who have made no arrests, are calling it a gang-related shooting.

On this day, July 12, the first three shots sound like fireworks. Pop! Pop! Pop!

A 90-year-old man who had been taking his afternoon nap is dead inside 1701 Summit. He later is identified as Luis Aguiar.

A woman, blood streaming down her face, runs down the front steps, followed by a man with a rifle. She runs past another woman on the sidewalk and around the corner.

“Please, please don’t kill me,” begs the woman left behind on the sidewalk.

She isn’t running. She’s just standing there. More shots, and she falls to the pavement. He walks down the steps and onto the sidewalk and stands over her.

“He shot her standing straight up first, and then he stood over her and gave her the business. He hit her -- boom, boom, boom -- and she hits the ground. He stood over her and gave her what's left, and then he retreated into the house,” says Marlon Robinson, who has lived on the block for more than 40 years.

The woman is later identified as Maria Teresa Aguiar, 59. Police say she met her shooter on the job, although nobody on the block seems to know where she worked. He was her boyfriend, neighbors said. They sometimes could hear him shouting inside the green house with its tidy front yard and iron fence.

It takes just a minute for the first police car to arrive. Another neighbor, who would identify himself only as “Mike,” says a crowd formed and people walked toward the scene, thinking the shooting had ended.

“It was like a parade,” he says.

He and Robinson warn everyone to stay back, but two women and a young man from Mexico keep going.

A police officer runs to the woman lying on the sidewalk. He checks her vital signs.

More shots, a lot of them, in rapid succession.

“It was like the movie ‘Heat,’ ” Robinson says.

Caught in the gunfire is the young man from Mexico who was doing odd jobs for a neighbor, a painter, and staying at his house for a few days. Jose Hernandez Iribe is the third victim shot to death. He was 29 years old and liked to work on cars. Some people called him “Tricky Lean.”

Another 911 call. This time it’s the shooter.

“I just killed someone.”

With the help of a hostage negotiator, dispatcher Diane Marin talks the gunman down.

“They want you to come out with your hands up, and they don’t want you to get hurt,” Marin says. “They just said that to you; I just heard him tell you that. They don’t want you harmed. They don’t want anybody else to get hurt. They don’t want you to get hurt, also.”

Finally, the shooter mutters, “I just don’t understand this.

“I’m coming out. Tell them I’m coming out.”

“You’re coming out?”

“Yes, everyone, I’m coming out.”

John Izeal Smith, 44, has been charged with three counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder. Represented by a public defender, Smith pleaded not guilty to all charges on October 16. Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys would comment, although police have said they are conducting their investigation as if preparing for a mental health defense.

Police have not said whether the rifle had been altered to be fully automatic. They turned down CNN’s public records request for an incident report, saying prosecutors instructed them not to release details. But neighbors know what they heard. “It was converted, or he was pulling the trigger awfully fast,” Robinson says.

The suspect had no criminal history, no record of psychiatric commitments.

He purchased the weapon used in the shootings legally.

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