Police can't figure out why killer drifter was in Lafayette 500 miles from home
LAFAYETTE, La. -- Police identified an out-of-state "drifter" with a history of mental illness Friday as the lone gunman who killed two people and injured nine others in a crowded movie theater here before turning the gun on himself.
Authorities were struggling to determine why John Russell Houser, 59, of Phenix City, Ala., set off on the rampage late Thursday, and what he was doing in Lafayette, a southwestern Louisiana city about 500 miles from his home.
"Why did he come here? Why did he do that?" Col. Michael Edmonson, superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, said at a news conference. "We don't know that. We may not find a motive."
Police said Houser was one of 25 people who bought tickets to an evening screening of the romantic comedy "Trainwreck" in Grand Theatre, a multiplex in a
busy part of town. Houser watched the first part of the movie, they said, then suddenly stood and silently opened fire with a .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun, targeting two people sitting directly in front of him first.
He fired at least 13 times, police said, reloading once.
Two women were killed. College student Mayci Breaux, 21, died in the theater, where she had been watching the movie with her boyfriend. Musician and graphic designer Jillian Johnson, 33, died later at a local hospital.
Nine others suffered injuries ranging from minor to life-threatening and were transported to local hospitals, said Lafayette Police Chief Jim Craft. By late Friday, four victims had been released.
"Here's a guy who was a drifter . . . who just happened to be in this theater and took two beautiful lives," Edmonson said.
Craft said police received reports of the shooting around 7:30 p.m. Within minutes, two officers who had already been patrolling the crowded multiplex entered the theater.
"As they made their way into the crowd, they heard a shot, and upon entering the theater, the suspect was found deceased from a self-inflicted gunshot wound," Craft said.
Houser's car -- a blue 1995 Lincoln Continental -- was positioned near a theater exit, Craft said. He attempted to leave the multiplex after the shooting but retreated when he saw police. Houser retreated back into the theater, fired three additional shots, striking at least one person, and then turned the gun on himself.
"It was apparent that he was intent on shooting and then escaping," Craft said.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered flags at state buildings flown at half-staff Friday out of respect for the victims. A contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, Jindal was fresh off a campaign swing through Iowa when he got word of the shooting and sped to Lafayette.
At a news conference late Thursday, Jindal said there was "no good reason why this act of evil should intrude on the lives of families." He added: "This is an awful night for Lafayette. This is an awful night for Louisiana. This is an awful night for the United States."
Jindal also told stories of acts of heroism in the theater. He told of two teachers, longtime friends, one of whom leapt on top of the other to protect her from the bullets. Both were wounded, but the second woman said her friend had probably saved her life.
The second teacher then dragged herself to a fire alarm and pulled it, probably saving many others.
"A lot of folks in that situation would just be thinking about themselves," Jindal said. "She had the presence of mind to think, all right, even though she was shot in the leg, she saved other people."
The shooting follows a spate of recent mass shootings and comes three years after another deadly rampage in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. Monday was the third anniversary of that attack, and jurors are now weighing a death sentence for James Holmes, the gunman found guilty of killing 12 people during a midnight screening of "The Dark Knight Rises" in 2012.
The guilty verdict in Holmes's case was delivered July 16, the same day a lone gunman opened fire at two military facilities in Chattanooga, Tennessee, leaving four Marines and one sailor dead.
Before the Lafayette shooting, President Barack Obama said in an interview with the BBC that gun safety is "the one area where I feel that I've been most frustrated and most stymied."
"The United States of America is the one advanced nation on Earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense gun-safety laws," the president said. "Even in the face of repeated mass killings."
On Friday, Jindal declined to discuss the role gun laws may have played in the tragedy. "This is a time for healing," he told CNN. "There will be a time for those debates."
Anti-gun activists quickly seized the moment.
"Two innocent people are dead, several more are injured and hundreds were terrorized all while taking part in one of our country's most beloved pastimes -- a night at the movies," Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said in a statement.
"Investigators have already made it clear that the shooter has a criminal history. As we await further details from the investigation, it will be important to learn whether he legally had any business owning a firearm and, if not, finding out how he got one."
Authorities said Houser purchased the handgun legally from a Phenix City pawn shop in February 2014.
But much else about Houser remained murky late Friday. He had been staying at a local motel, where law enforcement agents found wigs, glasses and disguises during a predawn search. Additionally, he had illegally switched the license plate on his Lincoln Continental, Craft said.
Craft told CNN that Houser "was maybe trying to disguise his appearance, although we're told that when he purchased his ticket, he was not wearing any type of disguise."
It remained unclear why Houser went to the multiplex, why he chose the raunchy Amy Schumer comedy and why he started shooting.
"Why this city? Why this movie? Why those people?" Craft said.
The Grand Theatre 16 is one of two Grand multiplexes in the Lafayette. The other was quickly shut down after the shooting "out of an abundance of caution," Craft said.
About 300 people were at the theater at the time of the shooting, including Jalen Fernell, a 20-year-old student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Fernell was in a different theater watching a screening of "Southpaw" when the gunshots interrupted the movie's opening scene. Fernell said he initially thought the noise was part of the movie but then heard the fire alarm.
"When those sirens went off, immediately my heart sank into my chest because I was like: 'Wait, those gunshots came from inside the building,' " Fernell said.
The audience "rampaged" out of the theater, Fernell said, emerging to the sound of sirens and the sight of police and emergency vehicles swarming the parking lot. Police were shouting directions over a public address system, and Fernell said the scene was frenzied.
A woman sitting on the curb was bleeding from the leg. A police radio crackled: "Six down in Theater 14."
Moments later, a horde of officers charged into the multiplex. Over the radio, Fernell heard the words "suspect down."
"I was terrified, because I didn't know what was going to happen next," he said. "My main thing was I was trying not to get shot because we didn't know what was going on. Everybody was running around, everybody was screaming. It was a stressful state."
Fernell added: "That's the last thing that you'd think would happen at a movie theater, especially on a Thursday night."
Police said people left belongings behind as they ran -- shoes, bags, cellphones and keys. The parking lot, filled early Friday with flickering blue light from police vehicles, was packed with abandoned cars.
Police said they have no reason to think Houser targeted any other locations or that there might be another active shooter. Investigators don't think Houser knew any of his victims.
"It does not look like he went there to target somebody specifically," Jindal said on CNN.
In a statement from Air Force One while en route to Kenya, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the president had been briefed on the shootings and the status of those injured.
"The thoughts and prayers of everyone at the White House, including the president and first lady, are with the community of Lafayette, Louisiana, especially the families of those who were killed," the statement said.
Lafayette City Councilman Keith Patin gave a tearful interview to CNN.
"It's so terrible; it's devastating," Patin said. "We're used to dealing with natural types of catastrophes, hurricanes, stuff like that. But nothing like this."
Kaplan and du Lac reported from Washington. Washington Post staffers Michael E. Miller, Abby Ohlheiser, Mark Berman, Teddy Amenabar, Ricardo Sanchez, Carol D. Leonnig, Robert Gebelhoff and Elahe Izadi in Washington contributed to this report.
This story was originally published July 24, 2015 at 12:00 AM.