Shooter had history of anti-GOP rhetoric
Ill. man had raged against Republican policies in letters.
BELLEVILLE, ILL. — The gunman who shot a top GOP congressman and several other people Wednesday at a baseball practice outside the nation’s capital had a long history of lashing out at Republicans and recently alarmed a neighbor by firing a rifle into a field behind his Illinois house.
James T. Hodgkinson, 66, wounded House Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., before being fatally shot by police who were guarding the House majority whip.
In the hours after the attack in Alexandria, Va., a picture began to emerge of the shooter, who had a mostly minor arrest record and worked as a home inspector. What stood out was his disdain for Republicans.
On Facebook, Hodgkinson was a member of a group called “Terminate the Republican Party.” Until recently, Hodgkinson ran a home-inspection business out of his house in southern Illinois. His Facebook page shows that he was a fan of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who last year made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sanders acknowledged Wednesday that Hodgkinson had apparently been among many volunteers on his 2016 campaign.
Hodgkinson frequently wrote letters to his local newspaper, the Belleville News-Democrat, which published nearly two dozen of them between 2010 and 2012. Many included complaints about the same theme: income inequality.
Hodgkinson, who spent most of his life in the community of 42,000 just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, compared the economic conditions in the wake of the recession to those that preceded the Great Depression. He excoriated Congress for not increasing the number of tax brackets and adopting other tax-reform measures.
On May 14, 2010, he wrote: “I don’t envy the rich; I despise the way they have bought our politicians and twisted our laws to their benefit.”
Less than a year later, on March 4, 2011, he wrote that Congress should rewrite tax codes to ease the tax burdens of the middle class.
“Let’s get back to the good ol’ days, when our representatives had a backbone and a conscience,” he wrote. Hodgkinson had arrests in his background for a series of minor offenses and at least one more serious matter. Court records show that his legal trouble started in the 1990s with arrests for resisting police and drunken driving.
In 2006, Hodgkinson was arrested on a battery charge after allegedly punching a woman in the face, then striking her boyfriend in the head with the wooden stock of a 12-gauge shotgun before firing a round at the man, according to a sheriff ’s department report.
On March 24, a neighbor, Bill Schaumleffel, recalled hearing shots being fired outside his house, which stands about 500 feet behind Hodgkinson’s home.
When he went outside, he saw Hodgkinson firing a rifle into a cornfield. He was squeezing off five or six rounds at a time and, according to the report of the incident, fired about 50 shots in all.
“I yelled, ‘Quit shooting toward the houses,’” Schaumleffel said.
When Hodgkinson refused to stop, Schaumleffel called the sheriff ’s dpartment.
St. Clair County Sheriff Rick Watson said Wednesday that Hodgkinson showed the deputy all required firearms licenses and documentation for the high-powered hunting rifle, which he said he was simply using for target practice. No charges were filed.
“He said, ‘I understand,’ and said he needed to take the gun to a range to shoot it,” Watson said. “There was nothing we could arrest him for, and there was no indication he was mentally ill or going to harm anyone.”
Hodgkinson’s wife told ABC News that her husband had been living in Alexandria for the past two months. His Facebook page indicated that he had left his job in Illinois.