Mental issues did not stop Louisiana shooter from buying gun

John Russell Houser stood up about 20 minutes into Thursday night’s showing of “Trainwreck” and fired on the audience with a semi-automatic handgun. He wouldn’t have been able to buy a gun.

Hardin said he once partnered with Houser on a real-estate project, but they had a falling out and hadn’t spoken since around 2007. “This was not a single burst”.

Investigators believe Houser, 59, planned to escape after the shooting Thursday night.

Mr Craft said Houser bought the weapon legally at a pawnshop in Phenix City, Alabama, last year, and that he had visited the cinema more than once, perhaps to decide “whether there was anything that could be a soft target for him”.

There’s hand-wringing that the gunman, who should have never had a gun, was able to buy one. Or was it Houser, a traveling, ticking time bomb who cruised Interstate 10 until he pulled his ’95 Lincoln off the road and into our community? His only known connection to Lafayette was an uncle who died there three decades ago.

Instead, police said, Houser’s mother sent him $5,000.

“President Obama has been relentless in his attacks on the Second Amendment, and it’s not shocking people are frightened and want to protect themselves”, National Rifle Association spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said. “If not, we’ll give them all the time they need”. That’s the conclusion police have come to after Reading the journals of John rusty houser.

Wife was “fearful of him”. Houser had a long history of mental illness. He was also arrested in 1989 in a plot to burn down a lawyer’s office, and the judge ordered a mental evaluation.

March 14, 2014 – Court document is filed to evict House from his longtime home in Phenix City, Alabama. About 25 people were in the screening room and 300 total in the multiscreen movie complex.

Clues suggest it wasn’t a spontaneous shooting. Inside a Motel 6 room he rented, they found wigs, glasses and other disguises.

Neighbors say he went from a choir singer in the local church to an evicted tenant who trashed and booby-trapped his home in spite of the new owners, WRBL reports. Houser opened fire in a movie theatre on July 23rd, killing 2 people and injuring 11.

His story has been in the headlines recently because a Colorado jury convicted him on murder charges. “It don’t make us look too good”. “We don’t have any indication that he watched that or anything”.

Lafayette businesswoman and musician Jillian Johnson, 33, also was killed Thursday. She played the ukulele and guitar for The Figs.

“Our campus is in shock and mourning over the loss of one of our own, Mayci Breaux”, spokesman Van Reed said on behalf of LSUE in a prepared statement. She was a student at Louisiana State University-Eunice and worked at a boutique.

Prior to her secondary education, Breaux danced and was co-captain of the cheerleadering squad at Hanson Memorial High School in Franklin, her hometown, according to past reports.

Her boyfriend of about three years, Matthew Rodriguez, was shot in the neck and armpit, according to his cousin.