Killer treated for mental illness

DALLAS — The gunman who killed seven people in Texas over Labor Day weekend was hospitalized nearly two decades ago at a psychiatric facility, where he punched a hole in a wall and menaced security officers with a piece of pipe pried from a toilet before being arrested, according to police.

Seth Ator was being treated in July 2001 at an in-patient facility in Waco, about 105 miles south of Dallas, when he became so violent that personnel called the police, Assistant Chief Robert Lanning said Wednesday.

The next month, Ator, then 18, tried to break into a woman’s bedroom after threatening to kill her brother, according to arrest reports obtained by The Associated Press. A day after the attempted break-in, he jumped from a second-floor window to evade authorities but was eventually taken into custody and back to the hospital, where it was determined that he had “suicidal tendencies,” the documents show.

It is unclear whether the events nearly two decades ago in Waco and the suburb of Lorena have any bearing on the Aug. 31 shooting that stretched from Midland to Odessa, some 350 miles away. It also is unknown whether the hospitalization affected a federal background check that a law enforcement official said blocked Ator from buying a gun in 2014 because of a “mental-health issue.”

But an interview with Waco police and reports from the McLennan County sheriff’s office portray a man who was deeply troubled 18 years before authorities say he opened fire in a shooting that spanned 10 miles.

Officers killed Ator, 36, outside a busy Odessa movie theater after shootings that lasted more than an hour and injured around two dozen people in addition to the dead.

Investigators are looking into how Ator obtained the rifle he used despite failing a background check.