‘Mom, it’s all over now’
The mother of a gunman who shot 14 people, killing four, during a rampage in Northern California said he called her a day earlier and told her that he was finished feuding with the small rural community where he lived.
“Mom it’s all over now,’’ Kevin Neal’s mother said he told her in their final conversation. “I have done everything I could do and I am fighting against everyone who lives in this area.’’
Neal’s mother talked to The Associated Press by phone from Raleigh, North Carolina, where she lives and where Neal grew up before moving to California, where he was working as a pot farmer and had recently married his longtime girlfriend before he died in a shootout with police on Tuesday.
The mother asked that only her first name, Annie, be used because she feared for her safety. She was unaware of her son’s role in the rampage until contacted by AP.
In her last few talks with her son, Neal’s mother said he sounded desperate and despairing over his relationship with his neighbors, who he said were cooking meth and creating fumes that were harming his nine dogs.
“All of a sudden, now I’m on a cliff and there’s nowhere to go,’’ she recalled her son telling her. “No matter where I go for help here I get nobody who will help me. All they are doing is trying to execute me here.’’
The first two people Neal shot and killed were neighbors before he sought seemingly random victims elsewhere, including an elementary school, where he was locked out.
He had been charged with stabbing one of the neighbors in January, and Annie said she posted the $160,000 bail for him and had spent over $10,000 on lawyer’s fees.
Police have declined to identify the shooter until his relatives are notified of his death, but confirmed the same man was charged with the January assault.