AN ALABAMA man who killed 10 people in a frenzied shooting rampage on Tuesday kept a list of people “who had done him wrong”, investigators said last night.
Michael McLendon (28) fired more than 200 rounds of ammunition during an hour-long rampage that started at his mother’s home and left five relatives and five others dead before the gunman shot himself.
“He cleaned his family out,” Coffee county coroner Robert Preachers said. “We don’t know what triggered it.”
District attorney Gary McAliley said investigators had found McLendon’s “revenge list” at his home, adding that it listed a number of former employers, including a sausage factory where he suddenly left his job last Wednesday.
“We found a list of people he worked with, people who had done him wrong,” Mr McAliley said.
The killing began at about 3.30pm on Tuesday when McLendon killed his mother at her home in Kinston, just north of Alabama’s border with Florida, setting the house on fire and shooting four dogs. McLendon shot his mother as she lay on a sofa and covered her corpse with the bodies of three of her dogs and a pile of towels that he sprinkled with lighter fuel before starting the fire.
Then he drove 12 miles to Samson, where he killed his 74-year-old grandmother, his uncle and two cousins, some of whom were sitting on a porch outside their house. Tom Knowles, a neighbour, said he saw McLendon, who was wearing a military-style vest and khaki trousers, step out of a burgundy Mitsubisi Eclipse, walk up to the house and open fire with an assault rifle.
“The car door was open the whole time. He never said a word. After he killed everybody on the porch, he went in the house,” Mr Knowles said.
“There was some more shooting in there. He chased one lady out of the house. She came out the back door. He was holding an automatic pistol by then and he fired six or seven times.”
Three of those sitting on the porch were the wife and two daughters of sheriff’s deputy Josh Myers, who lived across the road. Mr Myers four-month-old daughter survived but his wife and 18-month-old daughter were killed.
“I cried so much yesterday, I don’t have a tear left in me,” Mr Myers said yesterday. “I feel like I should be able to walk in the house and my wife would be there, my baby girl climbing on me.”
As McLendon walked into a trailer next door and shot another woman, Mr Knowles crouched in his driveway behind a red Chevrolet Camaro.
“He had me in the front of that Camaro,” he said. “I figured the only thing I had between him and me was that Camaro.”
After killing his relatives, McLendon returned to his car and drove around the town, shooting out of the car window and killing people apparently at random. He shot one woman as she walked out of a petrol station, shot a man in the back as he tried to run away and killed another man who was driving a car.
As police pursued him, McLendon drove 12 miles farther east to the Reliable Metal Products plant where he worked until 2003.
He got out of his car and fired at police, wounding local police chief Frankie Lindsey before walking inside and killing himself. “It’s a miracle we both survived,” said Mr Lindsey, who sustained a slight gunshot wound to his shoulder.
“We had rounds coming in all over our cars. Really it happened so quick I didn’t have time to think about it. It was the loudest burst of fire I’d ever heard, and I knew we were dealing with a high-powered rifle.”
McLendon worked at the sausage factory until he quit without warning last week. Colleagues and neighbours described him as quiet, reliable and well liked.
“Michael by nature was a quiet person that never had very much to say. He just did his job,” the company’s human resources manager, Erik Ennis, said. “I don’t know what caused him to snap. It’s just a tragic event.”
Samson mayor Clay King said he had known McLendon all his life and had no idea what triggered the shootings. “If you would have asked me two days ago if he was capable of this, I would have said certainly not.”
The deadliest mass shooting in US history was in April 2006, when Cho Seung-Hui (23) killed 32 people in a dormitory and a classroom at Virginia Tech university.
In February last year, former student Steven Kazmierczak (27) opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, killing five students and wounding 18 others before committing suicide.
