Girl Says Father Appeared to Choke Dying Mother

A 15-year-old Chatsworth girl testified Thursday that she watched her father--a former sheriff’s deputy--apparently trying to strangle her mother as she lay on the dining room floor screaming that she had been shot.

The testimony came in a San Fernando Superior Court hearing that ended with her father, Anthony Michael Scalzo, 49, ordered to stand trial on charges he murdered his wife, Joan Patricia Scalzo, 44, a fifth-grade teacher at Pinecrest Elementary School in Northridge.

Joan Scalzo was shot twice in the head with a .38-caliber revolver Feb. 20, 1989, in her Chatsworth home, in the 1000 block of Nevada Street. Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert S. Nishinaka said the Scalzos, who were getting divorced, had been quarreling about selling the house.

Claudia Scalzo, a high school junior, testified that she was working on the pool in the back yard when she heard a loud bang. She went into the dining room and saw her father bending over her mother on the floor.

“He was over her with both hands around her neck, on the pulse points,” Claudia Scalzo said calmly. “She asked me to get him off her. I tried pulling on his arm. Then he told me that there was an accident and asked me to get an ambulance.”

The teen-ager matter-of-factly described calling the paramedics, then returning to the dining room, where her father told her that her mother had shot herself accidentally while cleaning a gun. Her mother was not speaking any more.

Claudia Scalzo said that her father--who served as a sheriff’s deputy from 1972 until suffering a back injury in 1984--kept several guns around the house, but that her mother never used or cleaned them.

The Scalzo’s next-door neighbor, Michael B. Tindell, testified that he heard a gunshot and ran to the Scalzo home. Standing at the front door, he heard Joan Scalzo repeatedly screaming for police and an ambulance, he said.

“She was helpless, calling out, wanting somebody to do something,” Tindell said. Minutes later, Tindell heard a second shot, and then Joan Scalzo was quiet, he said.

Tindell knocked on the front door until Anthony Scalzo let him in, he said. Tindell said Scalzo told him that he and his wife were struggling over the gun when it went off by accident.

Anthony Scalzo did not make any effort to help his wife, Tindell said. He did not help his neighbor administer CPR, and when the paramedics arrived outside, Scalzo did not rush out to bring them in, Tindell testified.

“He was very slow to help do anything. He did not help at all,” Tindell said. He said he could hear Claudia in a back room screaming and crying.