Wife of man who shot at legislators wishes she had done more

BELLEVILLE, Ill. — He flung dishes at his wife, roared at the television, erupted during an outing at a local brewery. Suzanne Hodgkinson became so concerned with her husband’s growing anger that she wrote to his doctor asking for help.

Now, the wife of the man who opened fire on a congressional baseball team in June wonders what more she could have done.

“I get up every morning feeling guilty because I didn’t stop it,” Hodgkinson said Wednesday in an interview at her home in Belleville, where the blinds are drawn tight and photographs of her husband adorn a living room wall. It was her first sit-down interview with a reporter since her husband, James Thomas Hodgkinson, attacked a Republican congressional baseball team practice in Alexandria, Va., grievously wounding a Republican congressman and three other people before authorities killed him.

She continued, “I wake up with hot sweats, thinking: ‘You should have known. You should have known.’ ”

To be the spouse, or the parent, or the child of someone who commits a mass shooting is to enter a strange club whose members are envied by no one and reviled by many. Rites of passage include hate mail, death threats and the vicious thoughts that haunt them at night. That they should have seen it coming. That they could have done something. That they are alone.

And then there is the question of how to mourn. How to dispose of a body that everyone else wants to forget.

On Tuesday, Suzanne Hodgkinson, 65, received an email while at her job at an accountant’s office on Main Street, asking her to identify the body. A formality. When she clicked to open the attachment, her husband’s swollen face stared back at her. “That’s Tom,” she said she had written back, before hitting delete.

She would like to deal with James Hodgkinson’s remains as quickly and quietly as possible, she said. He was not a bad man at his core, she believes. They married in 1984. When they met, he was happy, singing in her ear at a grocery store. Later, they took in some 35 foster children and adopted two.

But in the late 1990s, after a long illness, he took a turn, she said. His rage came more suddenly. Now she wants it all to go away.

She has asked a funeral home run by a friend to cremate Hodgkinson’s body. After that, she may scatter the ashes at home, or bury them in nearby St. Louis. She won’t be informing the public. There will be no ceremony.

“Coldhearted as it may be, I’m done,” Suzanne Hodgkinson said. “He was not a religious man, and I’m done with this. I want this to get over. I want my granddaughters to be able to go to school in September without this being dredged up.”

She paused, then spoke as if James Hodgkinson were sitting on the couch next to her. “You just walked out on me.”

The number of mass shootings in the United States has risen sharply in recent years — to an average of 16.4 per year between 2007 and 2013, from 6.4 per year between 2000 and 2006. (These numbers come from the FBI and exclude episodes tied to domestic violence and gangs.)