Gunman in Virginia hated Trump
BELLEVILLE, ILL. • The gunman who shot a top Republican congressman and several other people Wednesday at a baseball practice outside the U.S. capital had a long history of lashing out at Republicans and once frightened a neighbour by firing a rifle into a field behind his Illinois house.
James T. Hodgkinson, 66, wounded House Rep. Steve Scalise before Hodgkinson was fatally shot by police who had been guarding the House majority whip.
In the hours after the attack in Alexandria, Va., a picture began to emerge of an attacker with a mostly minor arrest record who worked as a home inspector and despised the Republican party and Donald Trump.
On Facebook, Hodgkinson was a member of a group called “Terminate the Republican Party.”
According to The New York Times, he signed an online petition calling for the president to be impeached, posting it on Facebook with the chilling comment: “It’s time to destroy Trump & co.”
His brother, Michael Hodgkinson, said Hodgkinson travelled in recent weeks to Washington to protest, the Times reported.
“I know he wasn’t happy with the way things were going, the election results and stuff,” Michael Hodgkinson told the Times shortly after he received the news Wednesday. He said he had not been close to his brother and was not aware of why he remained in Washington.
Until recently, Hodgkinson ran a home-inspection business out of his house. His Facebook page shows he was a fan of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who last year made an unsuccessful presidential bid. Sanders acknowledged Wednesday that Hodgkinson had apparently been among many volunteers on his 2016 campaign.
A search of online newspapers show Hodgkinson frequently wrote letters to his newspaper, the Belleville News-Democrat, which published nearly two dozen letters between 2010 and 2012, many of which 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 of the time to those that preceded the Great Depression and excoriated Congress for not increasing the number of tax brackets and taking other tax reform measures.
Hodgkinson also had arrests in his background for a series of minor offences and at least one more serious offence. Court records show his legal trouble started in the 1990s with arrests for resisting police and drunken driving. His most serious problems came in 2006, when he was arrested on a battery charge.
In April 2006, he was arrested on two counts of battery — one for striking a man in the face with a wood shotgun stock and another for punching a woman with his fist, as well as a count of unlawful damage to a motor vehicle for cutting the passenger seatbelt of the woman’s car with a knife. According to the court clerk, the charges were dismissed in November of that year.
Though there are no other legal problems listed in St. Clair County, which includes Belleville, since 2011, Hodgkinson did come to the attention of local law enforcement as recently as March 24.
Bill Schaumleffel said he heard loud shots being fired outside his house, which stands about 150 metres behind Hodgkinson’s home. When he went outside, he saw Hodgkinson shooting a rifle into or on a cornfield.
“I yelled, ‘Quit shooting toward the houses,’” he said.
When Hodgkinson refused to stop, Schaumleffel called the sheriff’s department.