Officer Describes Theater Attack

Nashville Metro police have identified the attacker killed in Wednesday’s Antioch movie theater attack as 29-year-old Vincente David Montano.

One of the people hit with the pepper spray in the theater also had a cut that evidently was caused by a hatchet, Aaron said. More people entered the auditorium, and police said Montano suddenly doused the two women with pepper spray.

The officer, who grew up in the Antioch area of Nashville and went to the complex often as a teen, raced with another officer up to the projection room for theater 4, where “Mad Max: Fury Road” was about to begin.

The Inquisitr reports that the Nashville shooter had been in the vicinity of the movie theater since 9 a.m. on the day of the attack.

In one instance on September 5, 2004, Montano told police his mother “controlled him” and would not give him his medication.

Montano was also charged in a domestic battery incident in 2009 involving his brother, Gerald Moore. Police said that call resulted in a Pruett filing a missing person report regarding her son with Murfreesboro police on Monday. Montano’s identification was established by fingerprints, which were compared to some taken during an arrest in 2004 in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

Metro Nashville Police spokesman Don Aaron says Montano had been treated at least four times for psychiatric issues. Police said Steven, a moviegoer who was with the women, stood up to intervene. The Nashville Rescue Mission said in a statement that Montano had checked into their men’s facility at a different address, in May and on August 3, but there was no record of him ever being an overnight guest. The former Marine entered the darkened theater, with the movie still playing, and encountered Montano, who appeared to be shooting at him.

In the wake of the attack, police released an image of Montano’s realistic-looking replica gun had, and revealed it was in fact an Airsoft pellet gun. Officers reported that Montano was hurling things at them and some said they heard “pops” as if from a small-caliber weapon, Aaron said. According to Second Amendment Check, Carmike not only banned guns in its theaters but justified the policy by pointing to the Aurora theater attack carried out by James Holmes.

The violence comes about two weeks after a 59-year-old drifter opened fire inside a movie theatre in Lafayette, Louisiana, fatally shooting two before killing himself. Reporter: His own mother sounded an alarm three days ago, filing this missing person’s report, telling police her son was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Police said Montano bought a ticket to the movie and went inside with his weapons.

Officials at Vanderbilt University Medical Center confirmed no victims would be transported to the hospital.

One man was injured by the hatchet.

One of those officers, Jonathan Frith, directed two other officers to hold security outside the theater. Montano then used pepper spray and fired his pellet gun toward SWAT officers as he tried to escape the theater through a door in the back.

Reynolds was thankful there were no fatalities and that Antioch did not join the list of other cities where an unbalanced individual had randomly killed people in a surprise attack.