Co-Worker Held in Killing of 2 Target Employees : Violence: Police say the suspect believed that one of his victims got a promotion he deserved. The shootings are the first murders in La Verne since 1990.

A young, disgruntled employee who believed that he was unfairly passed over for a promotion was arrested for the execution-style slayings of two Target department store employees in the eastern San Gabriel Valley community of La Verne, police said Sunday.

Sergio Nelson, 19, who had no criminal record, was arrested at his Pomona home, where he lives with his grandmother, aunt and cousin, La Verne police said. He was being held without bail in the city jail.

Robin Shirley, 32, and Lee Thompson, 22, both of Pomona, were killed as they sat in Thompson’s car in front of the store on Foothill Boulevard about 4 a.m. Saturday as they waited to begin their shifts, police said. Nelson walked up to the car and fired six shots from a 9-millimeter handgun, police said.

Shirley, the mother of two young children and a Target employee for nearly three years, and Thompson, a new employee, were hit several times in the back of the head and died at the scene, Detective Carl Brubaker said. No weapon has been recovered.

He said Shirley had recently received a promotion in the stockroom, a job Nelson felt he deserved. There had been tension between Shirley and Nelson for several weeks, the detective said. Thompson was simply “at the wrong place with the wrong person at the wrong time,” he said.

Other store workers said Nelson was a relatively new employee. Target officials declined to answer questions about his employment.

The shootings were the first murders in La Verne, a city of 33,000, since 1990, police said. The incident was also the latest in an increasingly common phenomenon of job-related homicides. According to Labor Department statistics released Friday, murders accounted for 17% of all deaths in the workplace in 1992. The study--the federal government’s first count of fatalities on the job--found that homicides accounted for 1,004 of 6,083 workplace deaths, second only to traffic accidents.

On Sunday, about 30 Target workers organized a carwash at the store, only yards away from where the shooting took place, to raise money for the victims’ families.

“I’m here to show my support,” co-worker Danny Cruse said as he sponged down a car. “It’s my day off, but I wanted to help. Robin was a real good friend. She’s really going to be missed around here.”

Another colleague, Gaby Flores, said many workers were so distraught by the news of the killings that they had to call in sick.

“We are all very close here,’ Flores said.

Dan Caspersen, Target personnel director, said a psychologist will be at the store today to assist any of the 190 employees needing counseling, adding that Target had opened a 24-hour phone line for workers.