Ohio shooter known as menace
Ex-classmates recall target lists, ask how law let him be armed
DAYTON, Ohio — High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended years ago for compiling a “hit list” and a “rape list,” and they questioned how he could have been allowed to buy the military-style weapon used in this weekend’s attack.
The accounts emerged after police said there was nothing in the background of 24-year-old Connor Betts that would have prevented him from purchasing the Ar-15-style rifle with an extended ammunition magazine that he used to open fire outside a crowded bar early Sunday. Police on patrol in the entertainment district fatally shot him less than a minute later.
The former classmates said Betts was suspended during their junior year at suburban Bellbrook High School after a hit list was found scrawled in a school bathroom. That followed an earlier suspension after Betts came to school with a list of female students he wanted to sexually assault, according to two of the classmates.
The discovery of the hit list early in 2012 sparked a police investigation, and according to a Dayton Daily News story at the time, roughly a third of 900 Bellbrook students skipped school one day out of fear of a planned attack.
Another former Bellbrook student recounted that he was on a school bus when a uniformed police officer came on board, asked for Betts by name and then escorted him off.
It’s not clear what became of that investigation. Police Chief Michael Brown in Sugarcreek Township, which has jurisdiction over the Bellbrook school, wouldn’t answer any questions about Betts from a reporter Monday.
Later, Brown’s department emailed media outlets “everything we have on Connor Betts.” The file included a copy of a 2012 Ohio state law that requires all sealed records of juvenile crimes to be expunged either after five years or on the offender’s 23rd birthday.
Though Betts, who was 17 in 2012, was not named publicly by authorities as the author of the hit list, the former classmates said it was common knowledge within the school that he was the one suspended.
Betts had no apparent criminal record as an adult, and it is not clear what, if any, criminal charges Betts faced when he was under 18.
Not everyone who knew Betts had bad things to say.
Mike Kern, a customer at the gas station where Betts used to work in Bellbrook, said he “was the nicest kid you could imagine. … I never heard him talk about violence, say a racist word or anything like that.”
He said they sometimes played trivia at a bar near the gas station.
“He was real smart,” Kern said.
“He knew all the answers.”