California

Gunman kills 3, self

Three people were killed and five hurt in a series of shootings, pistol whippings and carjackings that ended Tuesday when the suspect killed himself with a shot to the head inside a Wal-Mart, authorities said.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department identified the gunman as Toby Welchel, 38, whose last known address was in Indiana.

The violence began Monday when three people were shot in the front yard of a home in Thousand Oaks. A woman identified as Jan Heyne, 51, was pronounced dead at the scene, and Steve Mazin, a 52-year-old attorney, died at a hospital. Timothy Heyne, a rock music manager, was in critical condition.

The third fatality, a 48-year-old woman, was killed Tuesday at her home in a separate incident, according to police. Two of her children were among the injured.

The suspect was chased by police to the Wal-Mart store in Simi Valley, about 35 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles.

About 100 employees and customers were evacuated from the sprawling store as 40 to 50 officers surrounded it.

Officers who entered found Welchel dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Sheriff Bob Brooks said.

Las Vegas

Ford Motor Co. adds to mustang campaign

Citing the mustang as a “great symbol for our company,” the Ford Motor Co. pledged money Tuesday to help find new homes for wild horses rounded up on federal rangeland in the West.

“It just seemed like the natural thing to do,” Ziad Ojakli, a Ford vice president, said at a ranch outside Las Vegas where he and federal officials trumpeted the Bureau of Land Management’s “Save the Mustangs” campaign.

Ford introduced the Mustang line in 1964, selling some 8.5 million of the cars since then.

Its mustang relocation plan was spurred by the April slaughter of 41 horses at an Illinois meatpacking plant after the horses were rounded up and sold by the BLM under sale authority Congress approved in December.

Ford stepped in and spent about $20,000 to buy 52 additional horses. Ojakli said the company will now underwrite transportation of the horses to new homes.

Brazil

Mystery illness forces slaughter of chickens

Authorities ordered the slaughter of 17,000 chickens after 6,000 chickens died from a mysterious respiratory illness in a central western Brazilian state, officials said.

Sanitary authorities do not know what kind of disease the chickens had, but expect to identify it by the end of this week, Gladys Raquel, an animal sanitation manger with the state government of Mato Grosso do Sul state, said Tuesday.

Raquel and officials with Brazil’s Agriculture Ministry refused to answer questions about the illness, or whether it had similar symptoms to bird flu disease in Asia, saying they want to wait for the test results.

“Several diseases have similar symptoms, and as a result, we can’t say which of them is present in the area,” Raquel said.

The regional death toll in Asia’s latest bird flu outbreak stands at 54 people. Vietnam suffered the most deaths with 38.

The Brazilian farm in the town of Jaraguari where the chickens died was surrounded with road blocks.

The Agencia Estado news agency also reported that more than 100 other chicken farms were quarantined in Jaraguari, 20 miles from the Mato Grosso do Sul state capital of Campo Grande. Campo Grande is about 750 miles northwest of Sao Paulo.