Neighbour calls shooter a ‘lunatic’
LAFAYETTE, LA.— The stranger clenched his fists and shook his head, recounting a time when he tried and failed to beat a cat to death with a steel rod.
His audience, two women lunching at a Lafayette, La., bistro on a Saturday afternoon, sat across from him, shocked and silent. This stranger told them he once took in a stray cat and it got sick, so he bashed its head with the rod but failed to kill it.
“He was hurt that the cat lived,” recalled Bonnie Barbier, who listened in horror for 30 minutes. “It was this twisted sense that he was doing the right thing.”
Five days later John Russell Houser’s photograph flashed onto television screens across the U.S. as the man who opened fire, killing two plus himself, in a Louisiana movie theatre.
In Houser’s hometown of Columbus, Ga., some former neighbours say his life was a decades-long collision course with disaster.
In 1989, Houser, then 34, tried to pay a man $100 to burn down the office of a lawyer who represented a pornographic movie theatre to “save the world, bring law and order,” a local newspaper reported. Houser’s sanity would remain in question for more than two decades.
“He’s been known as a lunatic and a fool around this neck of the woods for years,” said Patrick Williams, an antiques dealer who once filed a police report alleging Houser sold him a stolen iron fence at a flea market. “I wasn’t a bit surprised when I saw his picture on TV.”
Neighbours said he flew a Confederate flag, passed doomsday flyers around his neighbourhood, pounded out winding, angry online missives and spouted admiration for Adolf Hitler.