Suspect in clinic gunfire described as odd recluse
Investigators in Colorado Springs, Colo., worked Saturday to determine what led to the shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic that resulted in the deaths of three people, including a police officer.
Police identified the suspect as Robert Lewis Dear, 57, but released no other information about him. He is accused of killing two people in addition to University of Colorado police officer Garrett Swasey, as well as injuring at least four other officers and five civilians.
The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs said Swasey, 44, had been with the campus Police Department for six years and responded to the initial reports on the shooting.
Authorities said Dear was armed with a long gun and also took into the building several “items” that could have been explosive devices.
State investigators and agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives and the FBI are also involved in the investigation.
“We don’t have any information on this individual’s mentality, or his ideas or ideology,” Colorado Springs police Lt. Catherine Buckley said. The city’s mayor, John Suthers, said people can make “inferences from where it took place,” referring to the clinic.
The clinic provides women’s health services, including abortions, and has long been the site of anti-abortion protests. A Roman Catholic priest who has held weekly Mass in front of the clinic for 20 years said Dear wasn’t part of his group.
“I don’t know him from Adam,” said the Rev. Bill Carmody. “I don’t recognize him at all.”
People who said they knew Dear described him as a recluse who stashed food in the woods, avoided eye contact and warned neighbors about government spying. His exwife described him as angry, at times, but usually pleasant.
Neighbors who lived beside Dear’s former South Carolina home said he hid food in the woods as if he was a survivalist and said he lived off selling prints of his uncle’s paintings of Southern plantations and the Masters golf tournament.
John Hood said Saturday that when he moved to Walterboro, S.C., Dear was living in a doublewide mobile home next door. Hood said Dear seemed to be a loner and seemed strange but not dangerous.
Hood said Dear rarely talked to them, and when he did, he tended to offer unsolicited advice such as recommending that Hood put a metal roof on his house so the U.S. government couldn’t spy on him.
Dear also lived part of the time in a cabin with no electricity or running water in Black Mountain, N.C. He kept mostly to himself, those neighbors said.
He tended to avoid eye contact, said James Russell, who lived a few hundred feet down the mountain from Dear’s cabin. “If you talked to him, nothing with him was very cognitive,” he said.
In the small town of Hartsel, Colo., about 60 miles west of Colorado Springs, about a dozen police vehicles and firetrucks were parked outside a small white trailer that belongs to Dear and sits on sprawling acreage. Property records indicate Dear purchased the land about a year ago.
A law enforcement official said authorities searched the trailer Saturday but found no explosives. The official, who has direct knowledge of the case, said authorities also talked with a woman who was living in the trailer. The official was not authorized to talk publicly about the ongoing investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Jamie Heffelman, owner of the Highline Cafe in Hartsel, said residents would occasionally see Dear at the post office but that he never said much.
“Nobody really knows him. He stays to himself,” she said.
His former wife, Pamela Ross, 54, who was with him for 16 years or so and once called police to accuse him of domestic violence, recalled a big man, well-groomed when she knew him, and gentle most of the time.
Dear could be angry at times, she said, sometimes with her. But he was the kind who usually followed a flash of anger with an apology, though he was not much for chitchat. They met around 1984, in a drugstore in Charleston, S.C.
Dear was raised as a Baptist, Ross said in an interview in Goose Creek, S.C., where she now lives. He was religious but not a regular churchgoer, a believer but not one to harp on religion.
“He believed wholeheartedly in the Bible,” she said, but he was not fixated on it.
He was generally conservative but not obsessed with politics, she said. He kept guns around the house for personal protection and hunting, and he taught their son to hunt doves. She said he believed that abortion was wrong, but it was not something that he spoke about obsessively.
After the two divorced in 2000, Dear eventually took custody of their son, who was 12 at the time. Dear raised him in North Carolina. Ross said she had been confident that he would be a good parent and male role model.
“It never, ever, ever, ever crossed my mind,” she said, that he’d be capable of an attack. “My heart just fell to my stomach.”
OBAMA CALLS FOR ACTION
President Barack Obama was briefed Friday on the Colorado shooting, a White House official said. On Saturday, the president released a statement noting that the gunman’s motive remains unknown but urging the public not to let such episodes “become normal.”
“We can’t let it become normal,” Obama said in a statement. “If we truly care about this — if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.”
The tragedy quickly found its way into the presidential race, with the Democratic candidates offering statements of solidarity with Planned Parenthood, which has faced conservative criticism this year, and the Republican hopefuls largely avoiding mention of the latest outbreak of gun violence.
By late Saturday morning, the Democratic presidential candidates had issued statements noting that they stood with Planned Parenthood, while few of the Republican candidates offered any response.
“Today and every day, we #StandWithPP,” Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote on Twitter, referring to Planned Parenthood.
Fellow Democratic candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and former Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland said much the same.
“I strongly support Planned Parenthood and the work it’s doing,” Sanders wrote on his Twitter account. “I hope people realize that bitter rhetoric can have unintended consequences.”
That the killings Friday took place at a Colorado Springs clinic that performs abortions made the issue even more combustible for the Republican hopefuls, nearly all of whom oppose abortion rights and many of whom have inveighed against Planned Parenthood.
Without mentioning the exact location of Friday’s killings, Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas wrote on Twitter Saturday morning: “Praying for the loved ones of those killed, those injured & first responders who bravely got the situation under control in Colorado Springs.”
Cruz has been among the most vocal Republican candidates pushing to deny federal funding to Planned Parenthood, even threatening to close down the federal government over the matter.
Fellow GOP candidate Donald Trump did not specifically mention the Colorado shooting during an hourlong speech Saturday in Sarasota, Fla. He did, however, bring up the assault in Paris and the attack this year on a military recruiting center in Chattanooga, Tenn.
If the victims had access to guns, he said, “you would have had a totally different story, would have been a different world, and I can say that about a lot of these crazy attacks.”
‘POISONOUS ENVIRONMENT’
While acknowledging that investigators have more to uncover, one Planned Parenthood official suggested the shooting may be rooted in the “poisonous environment” that feeds domestic terrorism.
“We don’t yet know the full circumstances and motives behind this criminal action, and we don’t yet know if Planned Parenthood was in fact the target of this attack,” Vicki Cowart, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said in a written statement. “We share the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country. We will never back away from providing care in a safe, supportive environment that millions of people rely on and trust.”
The shooting occurred during a period of heightened scrutiny for Planned Parenthood. In July, an anti-abortion group released a series of secretly filmed videos from a clinic in Denver that showed workers discussing the extraction of tissue from aborted fetuses before that tissue is sent to research facilities. Planned Parenthood officials have claimed the videos were heavily edited to bolster critics’ false claims.
Health centers associated with Planned Parenthood have been the target of threats and violence because of the organization’s role in providing abortions and lobbying for reproductive rights. Abortion-rights groups said threats against abortion providers rose sharply this summer in the wake of the undercover “sting” operation that produced the contentious videos.
In a Twitter message released Friday by Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, a clinic spokesman said 28 other regional health centers will remain open “no matter what.”
“We maintain strong security measures and always work closely with law enforcement agencies to ensure our very strong safety record,” the statement said.
At a vigil Saturday at All Souls Unitarian Church in Colorado Springs, the Rev. Nori Rost called the gunman a “domestic terrorist.” In the back of the room, someone held a sign that said: “Women’s bodies are not battlefields. Neither is our town.”
Cowart said that all 15 clinic employees survived and worked hard to make sure everyone else got into safe spaces and stayed quiet.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said the city is mourning and praised the bravery of first responders. He said the nation is wrestling with the causes of violence but that it’s too early to discuss that while the city is reeling.
“This is the kind of thing that hits the entire community in the gut,” he said.