"I feel as if the council and their quick-acting decisions pushed [Pham] over the edge," Daniel Jojola, who worked alongside Pham, said Friday as friends and co-workers gathered for a lunch next to the makeshift memorial for Pham at the spot where his body landed.

On Friday, some employees flew into a rage as City Council members arrived at the scene of Pham's death Thursday. One man had to be held back by co-workers, and another cursed at Chief Executive Tom Hatch in the City Hall lobby, witnesses said.

City maintenance worker Huy Pham jumped to his death from atop City Hall on Thursday, hours after the city announced it sent layoff notices to nearly half its city workers. Costa Mesa is making the cuts in an effort to reduce pension costs and contract out more city services to private firms.

The suicide death of a Costa Mesa city employee facing a possible layoff has sparked mourning and anger at Costa Mesa City Hall.

Noticeably absent from City Hall in the hours after Pham's death was Mayor Gary Monahan, who was working the St. Patrick's Day night shift at his bar, Skosh Monahan's, about two miles away on Newport Boulevard.

"We're in a family crisis here," said Helen Nenadal, president of the Costa Mesa City Employees Assn. (CMCEA), which could bear the brunt of the layoffs.

"Yesterday [Thursday] we had former council members come and be part of that family, and the mayor chose not to," she added. "That says it all."

At a news conference about Pham that convened at City Hall on Friday afternoon, Monahan refused to answer reporters' questions about why he didn't go to City Hall the day before. He initially only offered a timid "no comment" before he and other City Council members walked away.

About half an hour later, an official statement was sent to reporters' e-mail.

The mayor expressed sadness at Pham's death but also struck a defiant note against people who had criticized him for the circulated pictures of him posing outside his restaurant in St. Patrick's Day garb.

"What is lost in all of the rhetoric is the fact that this is a tragic incident in the midst of a very difficult situation," Monahan wrote.

Read the full story here.

--Joseph Serna and Alexandra Baird, Daily Pilot/Times Community News

Photo: Officer Cristina Goodfellow of the Costa Mesa Police Department kneels beside a memorial for city maintenance worker Huy Pham at Costa Mesa City Hall on Friday. Pham, 29, jumped to his death from the roof of City Hall on Thursday. (Kent Treptow, Times Community News / March 18, 2011)