Less than six months later, Satoshi Uematsu, 26, was arrested on suspicion of stabbing 19 people to death and wounding dozens of others as they slept at a centre for the disabled where he had worked for more than three years until February.
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Authorities have searched the house of a guy accused of carrying out the worst mass killing in decades of Japan, at a care home for those who have mental handicaps. Bent over in the back of a police vehicle, his distinctive blond hair tumbling across his forehead, he smiled warmly at the media throng outside.
Uematsu was earlier sent from a regional jail in the town of Sagamihara, about 45 km (25 miles) southwest of Tokyo, to the Yokohama District Public Prosecutors Office in Kanagawa prefecture earlier in the day.
With a blue jacket draped over his head, Satoshi Uematsu was escorted out of a police station into a waiting van before a crowd of flashing cameras.
He had delivered a letter to Parliament in February outlining the bloody plan and saying all disabled people should be put to death.
In a phone interview with The Christian Science Monitor Tuesday, he says it’s possible the country’s negative perception about disabled people could have contributed to Uematsu’s delusional beliefs. He sat outside the house speaker’s official residence for two hours, until an official took the letter.
The Sagamihara fire department has said 19 people were killed in the attack Tuesday morning.
A Kanagawa prefecture official told a news conference that Uematsu entered the building about 2:10 a.m.by breaking a glass window on the first floor of a residential building at the facility for the handicapped.
He then set about slashing the patients’ throats. It’s likely that Uematsu was in direct contact with some of the victims while he worked there.
The letter had raised concerns and Uematsu was committed to hospital on February 19 for nearly two weeks after local police contacted him. Police said Uematsu later drove himself to a police station where he surrendered without incident.
Further details of the attack, including whether the victims were asleep or otherwise helpless, remained unclear Wednesday.
The facility, Tsukui Yamayuri-en, was not unfamiliar to Uematsu. Earlier media reports had said as many as 45 people had been wounded. All those killed were patients.
“They were working at night and were questioned by police after witnessing graphic violence, which has made them a little emotionally unstable”, he said.
“They have been well received and blended in the community, and we were on very friendly terms”, 68-year-old Chikara Inabayashi said, while taking care of watermelons in a family garden.
“Many of the facility residents can not communicate very well verbally, because they are rather seriously disabled, but we smile at each other and dance together with the help of caretakers and volunteers”, she said.
“He was just an ordinary young fellow”, said Akihiro Hasegawa.
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Such mass killings are extremely rare in Japan and typically involve stabbings. Nineteen patients were killed, and two of the 26 people injured also were residents at the facility, which had 157 mentally disabled residents. “It is a matter of great regret for society to let such a serious stabbing incident happen”, it said in an editorial which also called for increased security at care facilities.
