Gunman in Rampage Kills 5 Near Pittsburgh

Toting a .357-caliber revolver and a box of bullets, a 34-year-old white attorney sped across two suburban counties Friday afternoon in a murderous rampage that police believe began with the slaying of his Jewish neighbor and ended with at least four others dead and one critically wounded, all of them minorities.

Richard Baumhammers, an immigration and import-export lawyer, was captured following the hourlong shooting rampage, during which he also allegedly fired shots through the windows of two synagogues.

The burly, goateed Baumhammers, dressed in a black T-shirt and dark pants, would calmly step from his Jeep, witnesses said, then open fire, climb back in and drive off to another suburban Pittsburgh community, where he allegedly would repeat the grim process. He made five such stops--killing an Indian man at a grocery store, two Asian men at a Chinese restaurant and an African American man at a karate school--before leading police on a slow-speed pursuit. He finally surrendered in the suburb of Ambridge.

The shooting spree was the second of its kind in as many months in the area. In March, an African American man shouted racial slurs before slaying three white men and wounding two others.

“Not again. Those are the first words that come to mind. Not again,” Pennsylvania Gov. Thomas J. Ridge said after hearing of the mayhem while at a Republican gathering in Pebble Beach, Calif. “Across Pennsylvania, and particularly in southwestern Pennsylvania, we are struggling to make sense of what appears to be yet another brutal racist rampage.”

Baumhammers, a onetime high school football player who neighbors said may have been living with his parents in the tony suburb of Mount Lebanon, is believed to have begun his killing rampage shortly after noon, when he allegedly shot to death his next-door neighbor, 63-year-old Anita Gordon, whom he had known since he was a young boy, neighbors said. He then allegedly set a fire in the Gordon home.

Firefighters responding to an automatic alarm at the Gordon house found her body a short time later.

“She was an angel,” said her husband, Sanford Gordon, who added that the Baumhammers family had lived next door since the suspect was a child and were “pillars of the community.”

The suspect’s father, Andrejs, is a periodontist; his mother, Inese, a dentist; and his sister, Daina Pack, a physician. The Baumhammerses immigrated from Latvia after World War II, neighbors said.

After killing Anita Gordon, Baumhammers allegedly fired shots into two nearby synagogues--one of which Gordon attended. Police said he also spray-painted a swastika and the word “Jew” on Gordon’s house of worship.

He then drove to an Indian grocery store at the nearby Scott Towne Center, where police say he shot to death a 30-year-old Indian man and wounded a 25-year-old Indian man. Their names were not released. Kent Kretzler, who owns a travel agency next to the grocery, said he saw Baumhammers walk out of the store tucking a gun into a holster or waistband and casually strolling the 40 yards to his Jeep. “He got in and sat for maybe five or 10 seconds without doing anything and just very calm and collectedly pulled out as if pulling out after buying a bag of groceries,” Kretzler said. “There was nothing there to make you think he had done anything wrong.”

Continuing northwest, Baumhammers made his way to the community of McKees Rocks, a few miles away. He stopped at another shopping mall, police said, parking near Ya Fei Chinese Cuisine.

Fifteen minutes after the call came from the Indian grocery, another one arrived at the 911 center, this time reporting two people shot at Ya Fei.

Vinh Truong, a cook at the restaurant, said he was in the kitchen when another employee sprinted in and screamed at everyone to flee. Truong said he didn’t leave but rather peered out into the dining area and saw his brother-in-law, dead.

“I see my brother Tony on the floor,” Truong said. “I tell everybody, ‘Somebody shot Tony.’ ”

Killed were Thao Pham, 30, a deliveryman of Vietnamese descent, and Ji-Ye Sun, 34, the manager, who was Chinese.

A short time later, yet another 911 caller was reporting carnage: A man had been shot at the C.S. Kim Karate School in Center Township. The victim, a 22-year-old African American, Gary Lee, was dead.

Baumhammers was arrested 15 minutes later after he stopped his Jeep and surrendered on the Ambridge-Aliquippa Bridge about 16 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.

Police said they found a revolver lying in a briefcase on the seat of the Jeep and spent shell casings scattered across the floorboards and front console. Members of a local bomb squad were called in to investigate what appeared to be an incendiary device in the vehicle.

Police in the area said they had never had any trouble with the suspect and knew little about him, other than that he had not practiced law in some time. Baumhammers said nothing when he was placed under arrest and appeared unemotional, authorities said.

Clad in a bulletproof vest, he flashed a grin at onlookers as he was led into a magistrate’s office in Beaver Falls on Friday night. He was charged with criminal homicide and reckless endangerment and was being held without bail.

Baumhammers was an undergraduate at Kent State University in Ohio, then graduated from law school at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., before earning a post-graduate legal degree at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento in 1993. He later moved to Atlanta to practice law, acquaintances said.

For five months before graduating from McGeorge he lived in a four-unit apartment building on a leafy street a dozen blocks from the state Capitol. Landlord Paul F. Miner remembered Baumhammers as a model tenant--likable and meticulous. He always paid the rent on time, Miner said, and invariably emerged from his ground-level apartment well turned out.

“He dressed like a country club guy--polo shirts, a new leather jacket,” said Miner, himself a McGeorge graduate.

“I did think he was wound a little tight a couple of times,” Miner recalled. “But a lot of law students are. There never were any problems.”

The shooting comes less than two months after 39-year-old Ronald Taylor, diagnosed as schizophrenic, allegedly killed three white men and wounded two others in Wilkinsburg, Pa.

Last July, 21-year-old Benjamin Smith, an avowed white supremacist, chose the Independence Day weekend to embark on a racist shooting spree across Illinois and Indiana. Smith killed two people and wounded seven before killing himself as police pursued him through rural Southern Illinois.

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Bailey reported from Sacramento and Slater from Chicago. Times special correspondent Bill Steigerwald in Pennsylvania and Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this story.