Eight dead in North Carolina nursing-home shooting

March 30th, 2009 By: Michael van der Galien | Tags:
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gunman carolina

Eight people died in North Carolina Sunday after a gunman started shooting people randomly:

A lone gunman burst into a North Carolina nursing home Sunday morning and started “shooting everything,” barging into the rooms of terrified patients, sparing some from his rampage without explanation while killing seven residents and a nurse caring for them.

Authorities said Robert Stewart also wounded three others, including the Carthage police officer who confronted him in a hallway of Pinelake Health and Rehab and stopped the brutal attack.

“He acted in nothing short of a heroic way today, and but for his actions, we certainly could have had a worse tragedy,” said Moore County District Attorney Maureen Krueger. “We had an officer, a well-trained officer, who performed his job the way he was supposed to and prevented this from getting even worse than it is now.”

By late Sunday afternoon, Krueger had charged Stewart, 45, of Moore County, with eight counts of first-degree murder and a single charge of felony assault of a law enforcement officer. Authorities offered few other details, allowing only that Stewart was not a patient or an employee at the nursing home and isn’t believed to be related to any of the victims.

Investigators are still in the dark about Stewart’s motives for killing eight innocent people. His ex-wife told journalists he has “anger management problems.” Sue Griffin said she was married to Stewart for 15 years.

“He would get mad because of things that didn’t go his way. He never really hurt me, but he would get mad and blow up,” Griffin said.

A bad temper, that much is clear. But how does one change from an explosive man into an outright killer? What happened to Stewart? Why did he go into a nursing home?

We hear increasingly more about mass murders like the one in North Carolina yesterday. Something has to change: these things didn’t happen so regularly 20 years ago. Why do we hear about them every couple of weeks / months now? What is happening to Western societies that man turn into killers within the blink of an eye?

[Update]:  Police are now saying that the ex-wife of the killer worked at the home, though at present there are no reports that she was his target. Claudia

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