Credit: Dangerous Minds / Covina Police Department

Sometimes you come across something that would be extremely funny if it weren’t true.

The idea of a murderous Santa Claus is objectively hilarious. Jolly Old Saint Nick finally snaps, tooling up and raining lead on anyone unlucky enough to find themselves on his five-mile-long naughty list.

There’s a reason that so many godawful slasher movies have featured a homicidal Kris Kringle as its central character. Partially because the character is public domain, so anyone can use him, but mainly because the idea of him killing people is an easy joke that anyone can get behind.

It becomes an even better joke when you imagine it’s not Santa himself but a guy dressed up as the man himself. Some depressed guy decides that enough is enough, the world owes him something, and since it won’t pay up, he’ll take what he’s owed by forced during the season of comfort and joy. Now I’ve got a machine gun, ho ho ho and all that. It’s still an idea so ludicrous you can’t ever imagine it happening in real life, except people are capable of everything.

They’re capable of everything wonderful about the world, and while there’s no shortage of that, even in times like this, it just makes everything horrible we’re capable of sting that much harder. Like this case here, the ultimate story of a pathetic loser trying to get back at the world, and only succeeding in hurting innocent people. The clown didn’t even succeed in getting rid of the stink of being a pathetic loser; all he did was hurt people who didn’t deserve it.

While dressed as Santa Claus. Again, it would be blackly hilarious if it wasn’t a hundred per cent true.

Who murdered his ex-wife’s family dressed as Santa Claus?

On Christmas Eve 2008, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo had been divorced for one week.

Two years earlier, he’d married Sylvia Ortega, a union that fell apart extremely quickly due to Pardo being, surprise, surprise, a colossal piece of shit. He’d been demanding that Ortega raise the three kids she’d had from a previous marriage with no financial support from him, while also hiding the fact that he had a kid of his own from a previous relationship that he wasn’t paying child or spousal support for either.

Needless to say, the divorce was academic, and Pardo was suddenly on the hook for a lot of money. Being the pathetic scumbag that he was, he first tried to finance this by claiming more hours at work than he was actually working. When he was rumbled, he lost his job, and while his settlement payments were cancelled due to financial hardship, he still owed Ortega ten grand from the original divorce settlement. Unable to cope with the consequences of his own actions, Pardo took his revenge.

At a Christmas party that Ortega’s family were holding, Pardo arrived dressed as Santa Claus, with a set of handguns on his person and a large package containing an air presser converted to spray fuel. After Pardo knocked on the door, he shot the first person who opened it, which was Ortega’s eight-year-old niece. Thankfully, she lived, but the massacre had only just begun.

Pardo began opening fire at the fleeing party guests before spraying fuel into the house. The plan seemed to be to ignite the fuel from a safe distance, but it came into contact with an open flame before Pardo was ready.

The resulting explosion killed many members of Ortega’s family, herself included, and left Pardo with third-degree burns on his arms and legs. Pardo had plans to leave the country after his attack, but since it had gone so horribly wrong, he instead went back to his brother’s house and took his own life with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the mouth.

Silver linings, I guess.