A man with a troubled past was arrested on suspicion of murder after a body was found in a Vista home where he had kept SWAT deputies at bay for several hours Wednesday.
Deputies took Malcolm Pope, 26, into custody at gunpoint outside a North Citrus Avenue home. Video of the takedown shows Pope emerge from the house wearing a vintage-style soldier’s helmet. Tied around his neck like a cape was a flag bearing what looks like an Iron Cross.
According to sheriff’s homicide Lt. Juan Márquez, deputies went to the central Vista home around 10 a.m. Wednesday to conduct a welfare check. Deputies arrived to find a woman dead “with obvious signs of trauma” and a man barricaded in a bedroom.
SWAT team and negotiators were called to the scene around 11 a.m. and spent the next several hours trying to negotiate with the man, sheriff’s Lt. Sean Gallagher said.
Footage captured by OnScene TV shows SWAT deputies using a Bearcat armored vehicle to approach the home’s property line. Sheriff’s K-9 units and other technology were also at the scene.
Near the end of the standoff, deputies in the footage are seen moving down the side of the home with their guns drawn. At that same time, a man who authorities confirmed was Pope walks out of the front door, holding what appears to be a cellphone and some sort of printed image.
He follows orders to get down on the ground and is then swarmed by deputies. Authorities said they had Pope in custody by 5:30 p.m.
Jail records indicate Pope was booked into custody on suspicion of murder and held without bail. He is slated to be arraigned in Vista Superior Court on Friday.
Authorities have not released the woman’s name. Law enforcement investigators have sealed the case.
Few details of Wednesday’s deadly encounter have been released. But court records indicate past troubles for Pope, including an incident with his mother. Additionally, two former friends accused him of harassment, saying he made threats and slashed their tires — although it is not clear whether criminal charges followed those accusations because Pope was a minor at the time.
Pope’s record includes a 2021 criminal case in which he was charged with displaying a deadly weapon and resisting arrest. The following year, in September 2022, he pleaded guilty to the resisting charge. The rest of the charges were dismissed. He was sentenced in October 2022 to two years of formal probation.
But while that case was making its way through the process, in the weeks before he pleaded guilty, civil court records indicate his mother was granted an emergency protective order to keep her son away from her. The order also sought to force him to move out of the family home.
The sheriff’s deputy who filled out the application for that protective order wrote that Pope had pulled his mother from her vehicle when she arrived at her home, “dragged her to the street” and tried to search her for the car keys.
The application notes that Pope, who had a felony warrant for his arrest at that time, barricaded himself inside the home.
Years earlier, in 2016 when he was a minor, Pope sought a restraining order in civil court against two former friends he said ambushed him in his garage and beat him up. That case ended with an agreement not spelled out in court documents, although a statement filed in a different case indicates they had agreed to stay away from each other.
Three months later, one of those friends and a third friend sought restraining orders of their own. Both alleged Pope had slashed their tires and made threats of harm that they took seriously. Those civil harassment cases were dismissed when neither side showed up for court.
This story has been corrected to indicate that law enforcement investigators, not the Medical Examiner's Office, sealed the case.
