Man who shot Reagan freed after 35 years in mental hospital

JOHN HINCKLEY JR, the man who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981, was released from a mental hospital yesterday despite objections from Reagan’s family and his soon-tobe neighbours.

Hinckley successfully pleaded insanity after shooting Reagan in the chest and wounding three others outside the Washington Hilton hotel in an act inspired by his obsession with Jodie Foster, the actress. Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady, was permanently disabled after being shot in the head during the assassination attempt.

Hinckley was sent to St Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital in the southeast of Washington where he would remain for 35 years as a patient, and a subject of public fascination.

A judge ruled last month that Hinckley, now 61, no longer posed a threat to the public or to himself, setting the course for his release yesterday and drawing the ire of one of Reagan’s daughters. “Forgiving someone in your heart doesn’t mean that you let them loose in Virginia to pursue whatever dark agendas they may still hold dear,” Patti Davis, the third of Reagan’s four surviving children, wrote.

Hinckley is to relocate from one secluded locale to another, moving in with his elderly mother at Kingsmill, a gated community in the historic city of Williamsburg, Virginia.

Some six miles from the stagecoaches and the tricorne-hatted re-enactors of Colonial Williamsburg, Hinckley will settle into a home near the 13th hole of a golf course. His room has been prepared, decorated with paintings of houses and cats that he created while at St Elizabeth’s, and furnished with a king-size bed and television.

Some residents of the resort community have protested over his arrival. One, Joe Mann, told the “It’s not a matter of forgiveness, a matter of security.” Whatever