By Deborah Keeling
A soured romantic relationship had sparked a Manassas man to fatally shoot his ex-girlfriend and two other people, and injure three others in a violent spree that shattered a close-knit neighborhood, authorities said on Friday.

According to police and court records, Jose Oswaldo Reyes-Alfaro, 37, a Salvadoran national who was illegally in the U.S., was armed with a .38-caliber revolver on Thursday, when he went to the Hood Road townhouse which he shared with Brenda Ashcraft, 56, just after 7 p.m. The police said that after he fatally shot Ashcraft’s son and wounded two other members of the family, including a teenage girl, he shot Ashcraft in the head as she tried to dial 911.

The culprit then went to a house, just blocks away and used to kill his friend Julio Cesar Ulloa, 48, using the last bullet in the revolver, reveal court records. Using a large knife or machete, he cut Ulloa’s 77-year-old landlady in the head. “We’re not sure what the straw was that broke and led to all of this violence,” said one police official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He added that Reyes-Alfaro and Ashcraft had a “twisted personal relationship.”

Reyes-Alfaro has been charged with three counts of murder and weapons violations and was being held in the Prince William County jail. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, he entered the country illegally in February 2001. He was ordered to be deported in 2002 but later obtained an “immigration benefit” that allowed him to stay in the country legally, which was revoked in 2006.

According to court papers, Reyes-Alfaro has a child in El Salvador and that he told a neighbor he was in the military back in his home country. Ashcraft and Reyes-Alfaro had dated for some eight years, said Joseph Belle, Ashcraft’s husband, who had remained friendly with his wife even after they stopped living together. Police official said that Ashcraft and Reyes-Alfaro, who rented a room in her townhouse, had recently broken off their romantic relationship.

Just about an hour before the attacks, William Ashcraft, Brenda Ashcraft’s 37-year-old son, told a supervisor at his job at RailPlan International that he was worried about his mother and asked to leave, said the RailPlan President Terry Soesbee. “He said to his supervisor, ‘My mom called me, and there is some big concern about her safety and I want to leave to make sure she is okay’,” Soesbee said. “That was the last direct contact we had with him.”

The police were still piecing the events together on Friday, but said they were called to Ashcraft’s home about 7:15 p.m. Thursday to find a gruesome scene. Brenda Ashcraft was dead in the front yard, as William Ashcraft, who had been shot in the chest, was dying inside the home.

Two other people who lived there, a 15-year-old student and a 34-year-old woman, were also shot. The woman remained in the hospital Friday, and the teenager was released.