Students gather to mourn during a candlelight vigil for The Grand 16 theater shooting victims at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in Lafayette, Louisiana.
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On Thursday night, John Russell Houser bought a ticket for a screening of Trainwreck, sat and watched the film for twenty minutes, the stood up and opened fire on the audience. It’s still unknown whether or not Houser obtained the.
JIM CRAFT, Lafayette, Louisiana, Police Chief: It is apparent that he was intent on shooting and then escaping. “Why would you come here and do something like this?”
Houser never made it back to his auto. Though most denounced the shootings and called for prayers for the victims, “none of the presidential contenders offered policy solutions to address gun violence”, it noted describing it as a “reflection of the fact that gun laws are politically radioactive”.
He had only been in Louisiana since early July, staying in a Motel 6 room littered with wigs and disguises. His only known connection to the city was an uncle who died there three decades ago.
Houser had a history of legal and mental problems.
The Sheriff says the records are sealed, but seven year old court records reveal Houser’s wife at the time was so frightened by his “volatile mental state”, she removed all guns from the house, and got a protective order, accusing him of “acts of family violence”.
Educated in accounting and law, he owned bars in Georgia – including one where he flew a Nazi banner out front as an anti-government statement. He tried real estate in Phenix City.
Was it a loaded gun that killed two innocent women and harmed a host of other people at the Lafayette Grand theater?
Police believe he hoped to escape his deadly ambush before police closed in.
The 59-year-old departed the theater out a side door and walked toward a 1995 Lincoln, apparently attempting to put his getaway plan in place. He stashed the keys atop one of its wheels.
Warning signals aplenty resounded 30 years before he arose in a Lafayette theater Thursday and opened fire on patrons around him, killing two and eventually himself and wounding at least nine others.
But his mental health deteriorated, and Kirbey Houser, now married with a toddler, told friends she rarely saw him. The situation was so hard to comprehend that Mann said she didn’t scream. The United States has struggled to contain a barrage of attacks by disaffected “lone wolf” Americans, including last week’s attack on military facilities in Chattanooga, Tenn., where an American Muslim man fatally wounded four US Marines and one US sailor before being shot to death.
“It was a unusual”. “In that moment, you don’t think about anything”.
Jeanerette High School English teacher Ali Martin and librarian Jena Meaux were credited with helping save lives amid the chaos.
Houser told Barbier he had killed his cat and that he thought people should have an easy way to kill animals by giving them a pill and “finishing them off with an ax”, she recalled.
“After that first shot … there was this very unusual calm”, Mann, said.
Tanya Clark, 36, who was at the theater to see another movie, was at the concession stand with her three children when she saw people run screaming through the lobby.
“Her friend literally jumped over her”, he said.
The deceased were identified as Mayci Breaux, 21, from Franklin, La. and Jillian Johnson, 33, from Lafayette. Johnson ran clothing and art boutiques, played in a rootsy rock band and planted fruit trees for neighbors and the homeless.
Across Lafayette, there’s been an outpouring of love for the victims with people leaving them flowers and holding vigils or moments of silence.
The wounded ranged in age from teenagers to their late 60s, Craft said. Things have improved in recent years, with the number of mental health entries in the NICS index growing from 1.1 million in 2010 to more than 3.5 million last year, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which handles the NCIS system.
Nine people were taken to hospital with injuries, one of whom remains in intensive care and two have been released from hospital.
Authorities said John Houser was once denied a concealed weapons permit in Alabama in 2006 because of a domestic violence complaint and a previous arrest in the arson plot. “You know, I try to go to matinees and not to be out really late”. “Then he became your sworn enemy”, Hardin said.
But that’s not the way it always was, Houser, 61, said.
In 2014, facing eviction from his Alabama home, John Russell Houser set out to make sure no one else could ever live in that house. Police in Carrollton, Georgia, question Houser after receiving call about him being mentally disturbed at the home of his wife’s aunt.
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“What should be scary for the community is that the cuts being made in mental health around the state are allowing these people, who should not be walking around, to be out in the community”, the sheriff said.
