People Running Amok

Laughing as they killed, two youths clad in dark ski masks and long black coats fired handguns at will and blithely tossed pipe bombs into a crowd of their terrified classmates Tuesday inside a suburban high school southwest of Denver, littering halls with as many as 23 bodies and wounding at least 25 others.

The psychological profile of a teenager who went on a shooting rampage at his former school and killed 15 people began to take shape Thursday, as investigators described a withdrawn young man who broke off psychiatric treatment for depression. But investigators encountered a setback as they struggled to authenticate a chat room posting that purportedly warned of a bloody rampage hours before 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer wreaked havoc on this quiet town near Stuttgart, in southwest Germany.

In the deadliest shooting spree in U.S. history, a man crashed his pickup truck into a cafeteria crowded with lunchtime patrons here Wednesday afternoon and began firing rapidly and indiscriminately with a semiautomatic pistol, killing 22 people. The gunman later was found dead of a gunshot wound in a restaurant restroom, police said. The massacre resulted in injuries to 20 others, many of them listed in "very critical condition."

A gunman went on a rampage across two southern Alabama counties Tuesday, killing at least nine people and burning down his mother's house before shooting himself to death, authorities said. The victims included family members and apparent strangers, the Associated Press reported. Police were investigating shootings in four locations in three communities near the Florida border, all of which were thought to be the work of a single gunman named Michael McLendon.

Head bowed, eyes puffy, 15-year-old Charles Andrew Williams was formally charged with murder and attempted murder Wednesday, hours after shaken students began returning to the suburban high school that he allegedly turned into a bloody shooting gallery two days before. Dozens of Santana High School students appeared at the San Diego County Superior Court in El Cajon for Williams' arraignment.

A 35-year-old accountant opened fire at the headquarters of the Connecticut state lottery Friday, killing three top officials before chasing down and slaying the lottery's president in a parking lot. He then fatally turned his automatic pistol on himself. Terrified workers fled into the woods outside the building in Newington, Conn., near the capital, Hartford. Others hid in a paint warehouse and in a ditch during the carnage.

A student upset about not getting an academic honor shot four persons to death Friday at the University of Iowa before fatally shooting himself, a school official said. The dead included faculty members and the student who had won the honor. Two others were critically wounded, authorities said. The gunman was identified as Gang Lu, a graduate student in physics from China, Ann Rhodes, vice president of university affairs, said.

Friends said Marvin Heemeyer hadn't been seen much. Now they know why: He was turning a bulldozer into an armor-plated vehicle that was impervious to SWAT team bullets. On Saturday, crews used a crane to remove Heemeyer's body from the improvised tank. The muffler shop owner drove his contraption through town on Friday and within two hours had knocked down or damaged nine buildings before the machine ground to a halt in the wreckage of a warehouse.

The security guards figured he was just another well-heeled lawyer. He wore a dark suit with suspenders, carried an attache case and towed a large leather bookcase strapped to a dolly. But when his elevator stopped on the 34th floor, Gian Luigi Ferri slung two guns over his shoulders, grabbed a satchel full of ammunition and headed straight for the conference room of the law firm of Pettit & Martin, where he shot four people he had never met, who happened to be there by a fluke.

A man apparently distraught over the death early Saturday morning of his father at the Mission Bay Memorial Hospital returned with a handgun later in the day and sprayed the emergency room with bullets, police said, killing a nurse and a hospital trainee and wounding two others--a doctor and the father of a patient. The man identified by police as Bradford Warren Powers Jr., 46, of La Jolla, called police from a pay phone about an hour after the 5 p.m. shooting and turned himself in.

A somber police motorcade carried a slain deputy's body away from the scene of a bloody rampage Wednesday as investigators tried to determine what set off a shooting and stabbing spree that left six people dead and four wounded. The mother of suspect Isaac Zamora, who was released from jail less than a month ago, said he was "desperately mentally ill" and had been living in the woods. Dennise Zamora said one of those killed Tuesday was a sheriff's deputy who had tried to help their family for years.

A shooting rampage in Skagit County left six people dead, including a sheriff's deputy, the State Patrol said. A suspect surrendered hours after the shootings. Authorities did not immediately identify him but said he was known to have mental problems. The dead included a deputy who was shot while responding to a call and a second person killed at the same location, near the small town of Alger. Two construction workers were found dead nearby, and another body was found a few houses away, Trooper Keith Leary said.

A gunman opened fire at a church youth performance Sunday, killing two people, including a man witnesses said had shielded others. Seven adults were injured but no children were harmed at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church. Members said they dove under pews or ran from the building when the shooting started. Congregants tackled the gunman. Jim D. Adkisson, 58, was charged with first-degree murder and held on $1-million bail, according to city spokesman Randy Kenner.

"I'm going to kill people in Akihabara. I'm going to crash into a crowd of people and when the car is down I'll use a knife. Goodbye everyone." -- Text message believed to have been posted on the Web by Tomohiro Kato at 5:21 a.m. the day seven people were slain in Tokyo's Akihabara district.

There were seven wakes. Seven funerals. For nine days in a row, residents of this town of nearly 2,000 wore the same suits and black dresses each day, and carefully hung them up at night to wear again the next. They all knew -- or were related to -- the six young people slain here at a homecoming house party in October, a fusillade of violence that changed this logging town forever.

The gunman who killed five students and then himself at Northern Illinois University on Thursday was an award-winning graduate student, described by professors as friendly and respectful. Stephen Kazmierczak, 27, donned a dark coat and black ski cap before he began firing into a crowded lecture hall. But that was an image in sharp contrast to the well-adjusted man who was attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

With a pistol in his pocket, comedian Martin Lawrence ran into traffic on busy Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks on Tuesday, cursing and screaming at oncoming cars until he was taken away by police and hospitalized, authorities and witnesses said. Lawrence, star of the television sitcom "Martin" and the films "Bad Boys" and "A Thin Line Between Love & Hate," was found in the middle of Ventura Boulevard at Tyrone Avenue about 12:30 p.m., said Sgt. Bert Mora of the Los Angeles Police Department.

A 42-year-old software tester wielding three weapons shot and killed seven co-workers Tuesday at the Internet consulting firm where he was employed, in the nation's latest incidence of job-related violence, police said. The attack on the day after Christmas stunned this small town in the high-tech corridor outside Boston. Between 50 and 70 people were at work at the company when the rampage began. Authorities said Michael McDermott, who was arrested at the offices of Edgewater Technology Inc.

Charles Lee "Cookie" Thornton wrote a goodbye note Thursday, one sentence on a single piece of paper: "The truth will win in the end." He laid it on his bed. Then he climbed into the aging ambulance he liked to drive and set out for City Hall. Within minutes, Thornton would kill five Kirkwood officials and injure two others, including the mayor, in an attack that shattered this quiet suburb. Police and witnesses said that shortly before 7 p.m.

A customer who was upset over his bill fired several shots into a Knoxville Hooters restaurant, killing one person and seriously wounding a manager. Police were searching for the man, who left on foot just after midnight. Managers asked the man to leave after he refused to pay his bill. He then went outside and started firing a .40-caliber handgun at the building, police said. The shots hit another customer, Stacey Sherman, 35, of Applegate, Mich.