The shots were heard; the reasons remain unanswered

In Arcadia, a city at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles, a Thursday morning that should have been ordinary became the setting for a violence that no community can easily absorb. At approximately 11 a.m., a 20-year-old man forced his way into an apartment in the 800 block of West Huntington Drive, where a 15-year-old girl lived with her family. Authorities say he fatally shot her, then fled. An hour later, in Pasadena, he turned the gun on himself as police closed in .

The girl was identified by the Los Angeles County medical examiner as Mina Kurdian. She and the suspect, Paul Anthony Cruz Jr., had been in a previous relationship, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department . The circumstances of that relationship, and what led Cruz to break into the apartment and fire, remain under investigation. He was listed in critical condition Friday, authorities said .

Neighbors heard the shots and the screaming. Daisy Valdez told KTLA that she heard a woman yelling, asking for an ambulance. "It sounded like it was a mom for sure," she said . By the time officers arrived, the suspect had fled. Witnesses across the street at an auto shop described seeing police handcuff a man outside a Petco parking lot in Pasadena, where Cruz had parked his car, walked to the sidewalk, and pulled out the gun. Michael Amini, the shop's manager, told The Times that police arrived "about five seconds" after the shot. "It was really fast," he said .

The Arcadia Police Department received the initial call about a shooting and a man inside the residence with a gun. Officers found the girl with a gunshot wound and pronounced her dead at the scene . The investigation has since been taken up by the Sheriff's Department, which handles major crimes in the region. The sequence of events—the forced entry, the shooting, the flight to Pasadena, the self-inflicted wound—unfolded over roughly an hour, a span of time that separates one family's loss from another's uncertainty.

There is a particular weight to a story involving a fifteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old, a former relationship, and a gun. The details that have been released do not explain what happened in that apartment, and the investigation may take weeks or months to produce a fuller account. What is known is that a girl who should have been in school or with friends on a Thursday morning was killed in her home, and that the person accused of killing her is in a hospital bed, critically wounded, unable to answer questions for now.

The neighborhood around West Huntington Drive is a busy one, a mix of apartments and businesses where people know the sound of traffic and the rhythm of the day. On Thursday, that rhythm was interrupted by a gunshot and a mother's scream. The auto shop workers who watched police close off the area returned to their tasks. The Petco parking lot resumed its ordinary function. But the apartment where Mina Kurdian lived will not be the same, and the people who heard what happened will carry the memory of a morning that turned.

The Sheriff's Department continues to investigate. Cruz remains hospitalized. No further information about a motive or the circumstances leading to the shooting has been released.

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AI Image Disclaimer: The imagery in this report was produced by artificial intelligence and is not a photograph of the actual scene or individuals.

Sources: Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, KTLA, KABC