Lafayette Man Built Guns Used In Murder-Suicide, Police Say

A 21-year-old Lafayette native built the firearms he used to kill a 19-year-old woman and then himself at her home in Walnut Creek last month, police said today.

Scott Bertics secretly built two firearms used to kill Clare Orton and then himself by buying parts through the mail, police said. Guns that people build themselves are not required to be registered, Walnut Creek police Lt. Lanny Edwards said.

Edwards thought that once built, the guns would be illegal, but in California, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

“As long as you possess it yourself and don’t sell it, it’s not illegal to have,” Edwards said.

Nor was it illegal for the companies that make the parts to sell them. Edwards said coupled with instructional videos on the Internet, it created a lethal combination. Although Edwards said building the guns does not take a “rocket scientist” or a degree in mechanical engineering, he did say it was more complicated than merely snapping a few parts in place.

Bertics had enrolled at Stanford University in the fall of 2012 but took a voluntary leave of absence in the fall of 2014, according to university spokesman Brad Hayward.

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Hayward said Bertics had not yet declared a major, but he is listed on a 2013 demonstration called “Controlling Robot Dynamics with Spiking Neurons.”

He’s also acknowledged in a paper titled, “Developing Articulated Robots in Task-Space with Spiking Silicon Neurons.”

Detectives found nothing in their investigation to suggest anyone was involved or had knowledge of Bertics’ plan, police said. Officers responded at 6:50 a.m. on July 21 to a home in the city’s north Homestead neighborhood on a report of shots fired, police said.

Officers arrived to find the pair dead from apparent gunshot wounds in the home where Orton lived her family, according to police. Police have ruled it a murder-suicide.

Orton was a Las Lomas High School graduate and captain on the school’s cross country team, according to the school’s newspaper, Las Lomas Page. She was living at home during summer break after finishing her freshman year of college at San Diego State University, where she was an honors student studying environmental engineering, according to university spokesman Greg Block.

--Bay City News