The project manager for the new Fire Station under construction in Fox Hills was found murdered at the Bristol Parkway building site just after dawn on Saturday, according to Culver City police.
Authorities have no clue why Paul Bilodeau, employed by a Thousand Oaks consulting firm, was fatally shot four times, Sgt. Mike Shank told the newspaper this morning.
No suspects have been identified.
Associates of the victim said that while they did not know Mr. Bilodeau intimately, he appeared to be a classic straight arrow.
Although the coroner’s report is not in, Sgt. Shank placed the time of death as late Friday or early Saturday.
An employee of the construction company discovered the body at 6:45 a.m., as he was arriving for work.
What is known is that Mr. Bilodeau was working into Friday evening in the main trailer on the grounds that city interests share with the construction company, F.E.I. Enterprises of Los Angeles.
The construction firm’s owner, Gabriel Fedida, told the newspaper this afternoon that between 5:30 and 7:04 Friday night, he received “at least six or seven emails” from the murder victim.
Finding the Body
The worker who made the deadly discovery told police that the door to the city half of the trailer was open. He noticed Mr. Bilodeau’s lifeless hand in the doorway.
Police and private sources declined to speculate as to why the victim was marked for violent death by his assailant(s).
Police confiscated the two computers belonging to the construction company and the city, along with other pertinent documents.
They ordered work halted, at least for the rest of this week.
Mr. Fedida said the Fire Station is about 80 percent completed.
Denied access to crucial information in their computers, project officials were scrambling to collect data as rudimentary as the telephone numbers of site inspectors.
Seventeen months along, work has been halted on the $5 million Fire Station that is expected to be ready for occupancy in the early spring.
With the site padlocked by police, about 15 to 20 workers will be indefinitely sidelined.
Mr. Fedida, who placed the completion date at mid-February, did not know how much the future work schedule will be affected.
While police were delving into Mr. Bilodeau’s background today and attempting to interview associates and family members, he was remembered generously at City Hall.
“Paul was our eyes and ears at the construction site,” said Charles Herbertson, Culver City’s Public Works director. “He was thorough. He was well organized and he was detail-oriented, which is exactly what his job calls for. I am in shock over this. Nobody I have ever known was murdered.”
No one around Mr. Bilodeau spotted signals that anything was amiss in his personal or professional lives.
In the enforced absence of the computers and their myriads of data, the sudden loss of large amounts of hard-to-compile data could be a major blow to the builders.
Safeguards at the Site
Culver City has used standard security measures at the construction site, and there was no indication there will be a change.
This is not the first time the grounds have been violated, said senior civil engineer Andy O’Connell. A year ago, the site was burgled.
Mr. Herbertson said Mr. Bilodeau, a 45-year-old consultant, was hired almost two years ago during the pre-planning for the relocated Fire Station No. 3, which has been snugly based in Sunkist Park for almost half a century.
