A man who lost his family, home and businesses as he spent years angrily espousing right-wing extremism on television and the internet did not say a word as he opened fire on strangers in a darkened cinema.
John Russell Houser, 59, stood up about 20 minutes into Thursday night’s showing of Trainwreck and fired on the audience, killing two people and wounding nine with a semi-automatic handgun.
The gunman then tried to escape by blending into the fleeing crowd after one of his victims set off a fire alarm and hundreds poured out of the cinema complex in Lafayette, Louisiana.
But he turned back as police officers approached, reloading and firing into the crowd before killing himself with a single shot inside the cinema, police said.
“That was a horrific scene in there,' state police Col. Michael Edmonson said after senior officials got an inside look at the cinema.
“He took his time, methodically choosing his victims,” governor Bobby Jindal said. “One of the surviving wounded victims actually played dead to stay alive.”
“This is such a senseless, tragic action,” Lafayette police chief Jim Craft said. “Why would you come here and do something like this?”
This is such a senseless, tragic action
Investigators recovered Houser’s journals, and were studying his online postings and trying to reconstruct his movements to identify a motive and provide what Col Edmonson called “some closure” for the victims’ families.
Craft said Houser bought the weapon legally at a pawnshop in Phenix City, Alabama, last year and that he had visited the cinema more than once, perhaps to decide “whether there was anything that could be a soft target for him”.
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 Lafayette was an uncle who died there three decades ago.
Details quickly emerged about Houser’s mental problems, prompting authorities in Louisiana and Alabama to bemoan the underfunding of mental health services in America.
Court records describe erratic behaviour and threats of violence that led to a brief involuntary hospitalisation in 2008 and a restraining order preventing Houser from approaching family members.
Houser “has a history of mental health issues, i.e. manic depression and/or bi-polar disorder,” his estranged wife told the judge.
He was evicted from his home in Phenix City last year, then returned to throw paint, pour concrete down the plumbing and tamper with a gas line.