Ex-Employee Charged With 16 Counts in MCA Tower Shooting

John Brian Jarvis, a 58-year-old loner described by a prosecutor as a “very disturbed individual,” was charged Thursday with 16 felony counts for the shooting spree Tuesday at MCA World Headquarters in Universal City that left seven women injured.

In a 43-second appearance in Los Angeles Municipal Court, Jarvis pleaded innocent to nine charges of shooting at an occupied building and seven of assault with a deadly weapon. Commissioner John Ladner set Jarvis’ preliminary hearing for May 4.

Still dressed Thursday in the white T-shirt and blue jeans in which he was arrested two days before, Jarvis never left the glass holding tank used to segregate prisoners from the rest of the courtroom. He peered out at the bench and at news cameras but displayed no emotion during the brief hearing.

A gunman alternately pumped bullets from a high-powered rifle into the entertainment conglomerate’s 15-story Black Tower and swigged from a bottle of bourbon Tuesday before surrendering to Los Angeles police.

Two women working in the building were wounded by bullets and five were cut by flying glass.

Police identified the gunman as Jarvis, a former MCA employee, and said he was in despair over his inability to find work.

Sources close to the case disclosed Thursday that after he was arrested Jarvis gave police a 45-minute statement in which he alleged that MCA was tied to organized crime and said his life was in danger. Jarvis did not, however, tell police how those beliefs are connected to the fusillade of shots that peppered the MCA headquarters and a Bank of America building next door, the sources said.

If convicted on all 16 counts, Jarvis would very likely draw 30 years in prison, enough to put him behind bars for the rest of his life, said Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn, the prosecutor in the case.

The district attorney’s office sent an unmistakable signal that it intends to aggressively pursue the case against Jarvis by assigning it to Conn, who heads the office’s Special Trials Division, which prosecutes sensitive or high-profile cases.

Conn is also leading the prosecution against Damacio Ybarra Torres, accused of attempted murder and kidnaping in the Feb. 8 shootings of three doctors at County-USC Medical Center.

Conn won murder and kidnaping convictions in 1991 in the so-called Cotton Club trial, in which he argued that a former drug dealer hired three hit men to kill a producer after a movie deal went sour.

Conn persuaded Ladner Thursday to raise Jarvis’ bail from $500,000 to $1 million. After the hearing, the prosecutor said the increase was warranted because high bail is designed to keep dangerous people off the streets, and that Jarvis “is certainly a danger” to others.

Jarvis, who had been living in recent months with his mother in the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton, was fired by MCA in 1986 and had hardly worked since, according to police. Police Lt. Daniel Lang said Tuesday that Jarvis had “channeled all of his anger” at the company.

Jarvis has no prior criminal record, no history of psychiatric problems and gives no indications of being legally insane, Conn said. But the prosecutor added: “The act he’s committed is a very irrational act and he’s a very disturbed individual.”

The most seriously wounded of the victims, Dixie Tung, 41, of North Hollywood was reported in fair condition Thursday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was shot twice in the upper right arm as she approached a window on the 14th floor of the office tower. Tung underwent four hours of surgery to fix a broken bone.

Anna Kim, 25, of Hacienda Heights, who was also shot, was treated and released Tuesday from Cedars-Sinai for a flesh wound in her upper right arm. The five women cut by glass were treated and released Tuesday.