Long battle with mental illness marked man killed at theater

Three people suffered minor injuries. Aaron said there was a “great possibility” that Montano intended to use the canister as an explosive.

The man entered the theater, where “Mad Max: Fury Road” was playing, and fired pepper spray at viewers before an officer burst in through the projection room, followed by a SWAT team.

More than a dozen gunshots, fired in rapid succession, can be heard on the audio track of a video recorded during the shooting that killed Montana.

Vincente David Montano, 29, was later killed by police. It wasn’t immediately clear why he had been committed or if that commitment was involuntary.

Seven months later, Montano’s mother called police again and said she could no longer deal with her son’s mental issues.

Just two days before the attack, his mother, Denise Pruett, filed a missing person’s report with Murfreesboro, Tennessee, police. Nashville police also noted that Montano had been arrested in 2004 for assault and resisting arrest.

A man who was fatally shot by police after wielding a realistic-looking pellet gun, an ax and chemical spray at a Nashville-area movie theater had checked in at a homeless shelter in the city earlier this month.

“The only thing I had ever seen was the cops pulling up or you would hear an argument then the cops would come”, Doss says. Obviously an airsoft gun makes noise.

That’s when officers confronted him. Jurors there are in the process of determining whether Holmes, who carried out one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history inside an Aurora, Colo., movie theater in 2012, should be put to death. The three people who were pepper sprayed were treated at the scene. The report lists his address as “homeless” and says he “has a hard time taking care of himself”. All total, he hit three people with pepper spray and one person with the ax.

The victim says he has “no idea why this gentleman decided to attack us”.

In one instance on September 5, 2004, Montano told police his mother “controlled him” and would not give him his medication. Frith backed out from the theater door, but he and other officers kept Montano in the theater.

Police working at an accident scene nearby quickly responded to the reports of a gunman at the theater, Aaron said.

Nashville Fire Department spokesman Brian Haas said previously that police were responding to the theater in Antioch, a suburb southeast of Nashville.

Witnesses and police said that some patrons went running out of the theater, when Montana started his mayhem. “As he emerged with ax in hand and started toward officers, five opened fire”, police said.

Mattie Sanchez works at the Sprint store near the theater. He was also carrying a hatchet and two backpacks.

“He was highly agitated, he was pacing back and forth, so this went on for several hours”, she said.

He said he had used his weapon as a Marine.

Pruett said she asked Montano to mow the lawn.

He went to a movie showing on a weekday, in the middle of the day, not exactly a time when the seats are filled. It’s next to the Global Crossing mall, a past-its-prime shopping area recently upgraded with an ice rink developed by the Nashville Predators professional hockey team.

“This is maybe what we call the new normal”, Metro Nashville Police Chief Steve Anderson said. “Then he pulled out a gun and we all ran out of the theater”.

This attack comes just two weeks after two women were killed by a gunman inside a theater in Lafayette, Louisiana.