On Christmas Eve, Bruce Pardo showed up at his former in-laws’ house dressed in a Santa suit and started gunning down the guests at the Christmas party one by one, starting with an 8-year-old girl who opened the door to the man.

After having shot the young girl in the face, Pardo killed another 8 people and then torched the two-story house in a Covina neighborhood 25 miles east of Los Angeles.

The killing spree was the man’s way of exacting revenge against his ex-wife, after which Pardo took his own life.

Bruce Pardo, 45, had no criminal record and no history of violence, the police informed, but it seems that the man had some unresolved issues resulting from his divorce that had been finalized the week before, following a marriage that had lasted almost a year.

Police Lt. Pat Buchanan stated that the divorce had not been an amicable one, adding that the authorities were looking into Pardo’s reasons for the killings and that they had begun searching his home in the suburban Los Angeles community of Montrose.

The man arrived at his former in-laws’ house around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday carrying a gift-wrapped box that contained a pressurized homemade device Pardo used to spray a liquid that rendered the house to go ablaze.

The 8-year-old girl he shot, along with a16-year-old girl who was shot in the back and a 20-year-old woman who broke her ankle when she escaped the shootings by jumping from a second-story window are currently under hospital care.