Dayton shooter came with red flags

DAYTON — A series of red flags prompted Caitlyn “Adelia” Johnson to break up with Connor Betts, the man who killed nine people and wounded 27 in Dayton’s Oregon entertainment district early Sunday before being shot and killed by police.

There were the trips to the gun range and his fascination with shooting sprees. His attempt to drop a threatening letter off at the home of an ex-girlfriend. Concerns that he would hurt Johnson once she ended their relationship.

Johnson, 24, said she met Betts in a psychology class at Sinclair Community College in Dayton. They parked near each other and would walk to class together, bonding over a shared dislike for their teacher and their openness about mental illness.

Johnson said Betts told her that he was bipolar and obsessive-compulsive. She initially found him charming and intelligent. The couple’s first date — she asked him out — was at Bar Louie at the Greene Town Center in Beavercreek. She described him as “super outgoing” and willing to strike up a conversation with any stranger.

But on that first date in mid-may, Johnson said, he Johnson showed her body-camera footage of the mass shooting last fall at a Pittsburgh synagogue. He bragged about how much he knew about such acts of violence. At the time, Johnson believed he took interest in the topic from a psychology standpoint.

“Do you know tragedies from every city?” Johnson asked him by text once.

“A fair bit of them! :D [smiley face],” he responded.

Near the end of their relationship, Betts asked her whether she ever thought about killing herself. It was a topic he had broached before — she said he told her that he had twice held a gun in his mouth, but couldn’t pull the trigger.

When she visited the family’s home in Bellbrook, about 15 miles southeast of Dayton, she said Betts’ room was decorated black, a color he often wore as lead singer of a grind-core band, Menstrual Munchies.

“It was a dungeon,” she said. Still, Johnson said she never suspected Betts capable of a mass shooting — not even after he once called her while drunk, ranting about wanting “to hurt a bunch of people.”

She was, however, unnerved when he tracked down the address of a former girlfriend using a photo of the house from the girl’s Facebook page. He wanted to give her a letter so she would know he had found her, Johnson said.

She would later reference that incident in an online conversation with two friends to explain why she broke up with Betts by text message in May. She asked whether she could stay with one of them because “now I’m scared that he might try to hurt me or stalk me.”

The pair didn’t communicate again until tornadoes ripped through Dayton at the end of May. Betts reached out, asking if she was OK.

She wouldn’t send him a text again until Sunday afternoon, when rumors began to circulate that he was the Dayton shooter.

“Hey. Are you okay?” Johnson asked.

He didn’t respond.