Highlands Man Shoots Caregiver, Kills Himself

Palisades Highlands resident Howard Strolicht, 71, fired several shots at his caregiver, seriously wounding her, and then fatally shot himself in front of his house on the 1400 block of Paseo de Oro (off Chastain Parkway) Tuesday at 8:20 a.m.
“Strolicht had been suffering from a stroke and other medical conditions,” stated Captain Evangelyn Nathan, the area commanding officer of West Los Angeles Community Police Station in an e-mail to the Palisadian-Post. “Indications were that he pre-planned this suicide.”
Strolicht’s wife, Bitha, was at work when he chased the caregiver out of the house, shooting the woman twice, with a third bullet going into a neighbor’s house.
At that point, Strolicht turned the gun on himself, taking his own life. He fell to the ground with the gun still in his hand. The shots—and the caregiver’s screams—were heard and reported by neighbors.
Firemen from Stations 23 and 69 were first on the scene and the caregiver, 62, was airlifted to the UCLA Medical Center in serious condition. Late Tuesday afternoon, Captain Nathan reported that the caregiver had undergone successful surgery.
“She looks like she will do okay,” Nathan told the Post.
Ethan Lee, a senior at Loyola High School who lives two doors down from the Strolicht home, told the Post: “I heard four or five shots and then a woman screaming. I took my younger brother to the back of our house for safety and then walked out the front door and saw a guy dead by my car and a woman all bloody. A neighbor came down with towels to help her.”
Aiden Fite, a junior at Brentwood who lives next door, said that his neighbor had a stroke about six months ago and that doctors had prescribed several medications to try to help him.
“He seem to be depressed,” said Fite, adding that his neighbor was a gun collector, but that many of his guns had been taken away a while back. Fite said he once received one of Strolicht’s gun publications at his residence.
“She [the caregiver] was shot in the leg and the hip,” said Fite, recalling that Strolicht had gone to shooting ranges. “He was a good shot; if he had wanted to kill her, he would have. Someone said they heard him say, ‘Help me,’ before he killed himself.”
A neighbor, who did not identify herself before walking away, told the Post: “We’re like family on this block. We all know each other. Since his stroke, he hadn’t been doing very well.”
“He was a nice guy but had a short temper,” said another neighborhood youth, Adel Dibaei. “He was ill and didn’t know what to do with himself.”
A man who had moved onto the gated street with his family just days earlier suddenly came running up towards his house at about 10 a.m., intending to remove his wife and child from the area, but LAPD stopped him. They told him that there was no immediate danger but that he might not want his family to see the dead body on the ground. The coroner’s office had not yet arrived on the scene.
According to public records, Strolicht and his wife lived in Oak Park,  California, before purchasing their home in the Highlands in 1997.