A day after a murder-suicide at the Barona Gaming Commission office, investigators and the two dead men’s friends and families strung together more pieces of what happened but struggled with the question of why.

Authorities still don’t know what caused former employee Donnell Roberts to kill Executive Director Raymundo Casillas Jr. and himself Tuesday after ordering three others out of the building just before 10 a.m.

“We can never ask him, and he didn’t memorialize anything for us as to what was in his mind at the time,” sheriff’s homicide Lt. Dennis Brugos said.

An answer may lie in the circumstances of Roberts’ job loss. The commission initially said he was terminated in November, but two friends said Roberts told them he had resigned — an important distinction for Roberts as he sought a job with another casino after more than 10 years at the Barona Resort & Casino and the Barona Gaming Commission.

Advised of the discrepancy last night, the commission revised an earlier news release about 8 p.m. to say Roberts had resigned and was not terminated.

Yet Casillas’ wife, Julie, offered a different scenario, saying yesterday that her husband was forced to fire Roberts, whom he believed deserved better treatment. She said her husband was unhappy because commissioners asked him to do things he did not want to do and as a result he was ready to leave.

“The poor gentleman who shot him didn’t know that Ray didn’t want to terminate him,” she said. “It was a big mistake. If only the shooter would have known.”

Kathryn Clenney, a gaming commissioner and the general counsel of the Barona Indian band, said Casillas was not asked to terminate anyone without due process and never expressed any displeasure or an intent to leave.

In an e-mail to The San Diego Union-Tribune about 9 p.m. yesterday, Clenney wrote that the commission met with Roberts while he was employed to discuss forthcoming allegations of misconduct but rejected his offer to resign, believing he was “acting too hastily.” Then, after a thorough investigation and another meeting with the commission, it accepted Roberts’ resignation, Clenney wrote.

Rodel Rodriguez, 34, a commission investigator like Roberts, was fired from the commission the day before the shooting. Rodriguez said that to help Roberts’ job search he shared a commission staff memo with him in late November in which his departure was labeled a resignation. Rodriguez said he was told Monday that he was being fired for breaching commission confidentiality.

Rodriguez said Roberts, 38, was forced to resign because he had relationships with at least two women who worked at the casino, one of whom had two children with him.

Such fraternization between investigators and casino workers was discouraged because it could lead to conflicts, Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez and another former investigator and friend of Roberts, Frank Huntington, 46, both said they spoke to Roberts the night before the shooting and that there was no suggestion of violence. They said Roberts didn’t own a gun, but Rodriguez said Roberts was trained as a Marine sniper.

Huntington had made plans the night before to see a movie with Roberts on Tuesday afternoon. Rodriguez was planning something else with Roberts: a possible lawsuit against the commission over their departures.

Both characterized Roberts as a great friend and worker. Rodriguez said Roberts was a Pittsburgh Steelers fan who liked orange soda and video games, a motivator and leader who calmed him down when he got upset.

They said he never drank, smoked or cursed and rarely showed his emotions. If anything, his addiction was women; he fathered seven children by six women.

“Women were his thing,” Rodriguez said. “For some people, it’s cars. For me, it’s airplanes. Donnell was all about a good skirt, I guess.”

Court records show he owed four women thousands of dollars in child-support payments. Rodriguez said Roberts’ bills were piling up and he was living off hundreds of hours of unused paid time off that he had accumulated before losing his job.

Huntington and Rodriguez tried to contact Roberts as authorities spent hours Tuesday trying to figure out if anyone was alive in the commission offices.

“Hey man. You OK?” Huntington texted Roberts at 1 p.m. “Let me know if there is anything I can do to help you. I am your friend and will always be there for you. Please let me help.”

At that point, Roberts and Casillas had likely been dead for three hours.

Casillas took his job at the Barona Gaming Commission a year ago. When he moved into a La Mesa apartment at the time, his life remained in Arizona, where his wife and their son, Raymundo III, stayed behind.

Casillas, 43, was a member of Arizona’s Pascua Yaqui Tribe. He worked for several years as the head of the regulatory agency for his own tribe, which operates two casinos, before moving in 2004 to a similar position at the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, which has two casinos at its Scottsdale, Ariz., reservation.

Alma Lopez, Casillas’ sister-in-law, last saw him at Christmas in Tucson.

“He flew in from San Diego to come see his family,” Lopez said. “The light of his life was his son. He loved him dearly.”

After a year as the Barona commission’s executive director, Casillas was done, his wife said.

“He was making plans to move back down to Tucson, to be with myself and our son,” she said. “It was probably a matter of days. … There was a lot of conflict with the gaming commission there, and he didn’t feel that’s where he belonged.”

The biggest problem was dealing with employees, she said, and that he often was asked to fire people he didn’t think deserved it.

The Barona Gaming Commission is an independent body designed to ensure that the casino follows federal and tribal laws and meets the requirements of a tribal compact with the state. Commission members initially referred calls to tribal government spokeswoman Sheilla Alvarez, who declined to answer questions yesterday, instead issuing a statement directing inquiries to the Sheriff’s Department.

Brugos, the sheriff’s homicide lieutenant, confirmed that Roberts was seeking employment elsewhere but declined to say where. “We can say what happened, but the why is the thing. It’s human nature; we want to know what happened. As objective analytical investigators, we hate to say anything unless it’s based on hard facts.”

Staff writers Kristina Davis, Anne Krueger, Dana Littlefield and J. Harry Jones contributed to this report.