Enraged Man Kills 2, Injures 3 in Pennsylvania Gun Rampage

Apparently inflamed by repair problems in his home, a gunman Wednesday torched his apartment and went on a shooting rampage, killing two men and critically wounding three others at his building and at two fast-food restaurants before giving up to police.

Police refused to speculate on the motives that propelled the suspected gunman, identified as 39-year-old Ronald Taylor, to unleash his .22-caliber revolver. But Sgt. John Fisher, a negotiator for the Pittsburgh SWAT team who talked to Taylor, said the gunman said he was upset about a broken door at his apartment.

Some neighbors also cited a racial element in Taylor’s attack. A white maintenance man said Taylor, who is black, had confronted him with racial epithets since moving in a year ago, and an African American woman from the neighborhood told CNN reporters he had entered her home before leaving his building and promised not to harm blacks.

“I’m gonna kill all white people,” the woman quoted Taylor as saying.

Wilkinsburg Police Chief Gerald Brewer said authorities were still investigating whether race was a factor in the shootings. County police Sgt. John Fischer, who negotiated Taylor’s surrender, said the gunman only made reference to being upset about the building maintenance problem.

Taylor was arrested in an office building after he kept police at bay for about two hours. He was arraigned Wednesday night and charged with two counts of criminal homicide.

Taylor, who smiled to television cameras after his arrest, had no known criminal record and remained an enigma to investigators. “There is very little information about him,” Brewer said. He said that Taylor’s brother approached the chief during the hostage standoff and assisted negotiators.

The rampage in the suburb east of Pittsburgh came one day after a 6-year-old boy shot a schoolmate to death, and within months of shooting outbursts in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and Fort Worth.

Expert Neighbor Saw No Clues

Mental health specialist Judy Frost, 57, lived across the hall and said she saw nothing overt about Taylor’s behavior that set off alarm bells.

“He must have had a mental problem to do what he did, but not that you could tell from just seeing him in the halls,” said Frost, who assesses inmates’ mental health for the county jail.

In the experience of maintenance man John DeWitt, however, Taylor had been disruptive ever since moving to his efficiency in the subsidized part of the Woodside Apartments.

DeWitt, 63, said Taylor confronted him minutes before the shooting started. DeWitt may have been the original target, and the attack may have been racially motivated, the maintenance man said.

“Whenever he saw me, he’d call me a racist pig, or white trash, or he’d make a point of walking past me and brushing up against me. He just didn’t like me,” he said in a telephone interview.

DeWitt had just repaired a broken door in Taylor’s apartment when Taylor emerged from his doorway and confronted him.

“He looked at me and said, ‘You’re a dead man,’ ” DeWitt said. Taylor didn’t have a gun, but DeWitt said he felt threatened enough to grab a hammer to defend himself.

After DeWitt and a fellow maintenance worker took the elevator downstairs, Taylor apparently followed them, shot the other worker, then set his own apartment on fire. Maintenance worker John Kroll, 55, died shortly thereafter.

Bolting down the street to a Burger King, the gunman shot a second man, then proceeded to a nearby McDonald’s, where he shot the manager in the face, fired on a fourth man through the drive-thru window, then shot a fifth man. One of the victims, 71-year-old Joseph Healy, died at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Hospital officials said the three surviving victims were in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, including one that was in a coma. All five men were white, they said.

From the McDonald’s, the shooter then made his way to the Pen West office building, which also houses centers for day care and senior citizens.

“I have one bullet left; I’m going to use it,” Taylor declared at the office building, according to a witness interviewed on television. But he didn’t harm either the small children or other building occupants.

Forty-five minutes after learning that his co-worker was dead, DeWitt tried to analyze the escalating violence that apparently led up to the attack.

Saying he knew little about Taylor personally, DeWitt said the man had been aggressive to him since moving in a year ago, and DeWitt had reported his behavior to management. DeWitt, who is white, said he had no problems with the other African American tenants and added that he had done nothing to provoke Taylor’s hostility.

This week, two maintenance problems apparently catapulted Taylor’s fury toward DeWitt into violence.

About six months ago Taylor locked himself out of his apartment and split the door trying to get in, DeWitt said. Because it was the second door Taylor destroyed, the complex manager told DeWitt to leave it alone until it was paid for.

On Tuesday, DeWitt said, Taylor’s heat pump broke and he called the manager to complain that the maintenance man had cut off his hot water. Then on Wednesday, although Taylor had not paid for the door, the manager instructed DeWitt, accompanied by another worker, to fix the door anyway.

“I didn’t want to go there. They didn’t want me to go there alone,” De Witt said. After repairing the door, and facing Taylor by the elevator, DeWitt left the building before returning for a task he’d forgotten to complete in another unit.

“That’s probably what saved my life,” he said. The suspect evidently went downstairs, heading for DeWitt’s truck. Instead, he found Kroll, shot him, then returned upstairs to set the fire.

Alerted by the fire alarms, DeWitt bounded downstairs to find a third repairman, lifting his mortally wounded co-worker into a car to rush him to the hospital. Kroll died shortly after.

Neighbor Makes Heroic Effort

By Wednesday evening, residents who had been evacuated from the smoke-filled apartment were filtering back, evaluating the soot and the bloodshed.

Clarita Moore, who lives down the hall from Taylor, said she spotted thick smoke pouring from Taylor’s apartment. Her 23-year-old son, Arthur, wrapped a wet shirt around his face and alerted the neighbors. “That guy is a hero,” said an investigator who was outside Taylor’s apartment, which was almost entirely scorched by flame and charred with smoke.

Peeping out her front door at the water-soaked carpet and ruined walls inky with soot, mental health worker Frost said that until now, the complex had seemed a safe, if impersonal, place to live.

“They’re usually pretty good about screening the new tenants. He slipped through the cracks,” she said of Taylor.

Added 74-year-old Louise Mooney, “You couldn’t tell by looking at him that he’d do something like this. But you never know what people think about when they’re alone at night.”

Fritz reported from Wilkinsburg and Hart from Houston. Times staff writer Claudia Kolker contributed to this story.