As for his negligence of his first kid, it can happen to the best of parents.
Except the divorce settlement in this case wasn’t brutal at all. It was modest by most any standard. The complaint that she was “ taking him to the cleaners” was as irrational as his decision to harm others, even innocents who had never crossed him in any way.
She was paying family expenses with her salary, and helped him accumulate savings. It turns out Pardo ran down assets deliberately to cheat her of any claim to them; he spent or hid over 60,000 dollars in less than two months ( prior to his job loss), deliberately ran up credit card debt, and delayed maintenance and repair on his home to depress its value.
The drowning is suspicious in hindsight. It can’t be argued that he was a lovable goof incapable of murder.
Or that he was the “best of parents”...the abandonment of the child who suffered from his (best case scenario) lapse in supervision, and he was even willing to profit off of a child he was unwilling to support in any material or emotional way.
I’m not so inclined to view that event in the light most favorable to Bruce Pardo. He had a track record of manipulation and deceit, and there are accounts of that event with squirrely details.
Was he capable of either deliberately, or “accidentally on purpose” helping the near-drowning along? If annoyed, crossed, or feeling taken advantage of by a woman, was he capable of hatching a fantasy where his “unfair” situation is relieved and he gets away with it....and capable of ACTING on it?
Was he capable of harming innocent children to get his way?
Since those questions are answerable in hindsight, and not in his favor, a look to the circumstances of the drowning accident might look different in hingsight, too.
I am suspicious he tossed the kid in the pool, because the kid was just a crawler and he was the sort of man who would do unethical things to relieve himself of obligation. Short of that, he might well have passive-aggressively refused to supervise the baby, or left the sliding door to the pool open, just “oh please O please” -ing like that golden retriever in the famous Farside cartoon of the dog luring a cat into a washing machine with crude CAT FUD signs.
The mother’s account has her arriving home from a short trip to the grocery store to find Pardo “frantically holding” the boy. He had not called Emergency Response. He had not attempted any sort of resuscitation. Instead of calling for help to arrive to the home, he insisted they DRIVE to a hospital for help...
EMT’s at the hospital were able to resuscitate the child, who had appeared lifeless.