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Suspect named in rampage at Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic
Reuters
November 29, 2015, 5:33 am
Robert L. Dear is seen in an undated picture released by the Colorado Springs (Colorado) Police Department November 28, 2015. REUTERS/Colorado Springs Police Department/Handout via Reuters
By Keith Coffman
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Reuters) - Scant details emerged on Saturday on the suspect in a deadly shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, Robert Lewis Dear, 57, and police were so far not discussing a possible motive.
Police identified Dear as the man arrested in Friday's rampage at the Colorado Springs clinic but gave little other information. Court records showed he was once charged with being a "peeping Tom" in his native South Carolina.
The gunman stormed the clinic, which provides a range of health services including abortions, killing three people, including a police officer, and wounding nine others. After a standoff lasting several hours, he surrendered to law enforcement officers, authorities said.
Dear was being held without bail and was scheduled for a preliminary court hearing on Monday, jail records said. His police booking photograph showed a burly man with a white beard.
Friday's shooting was believed to be the first fatal attack at an abortion provider in the United States in six years. Police have not discussed the suspect's motives.
The clinic in Colorado Springs has been repeatedly targeted for protests by anti-abortion activists.
"We don’t yet know the full circumstances and motives behind this criminal action, and we don’t yet know if Planned Parenthood was in fact the target of this attack," said Vicki Cowart, chief executive of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.
However, she suggested a climate of rancour surrounding abortion had set the stage for such violence. "We share the concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country," she said in a statement.
Police said Dear most recently lived in Hartsel, Colorado, a community of a few hundred people, about 60 miles (100 km) west of Colorado Springs, the state's second largest city.
He was born in South Carolina and was married in 1995 in Colleton County, public records show. In 2002 he was accused of eavesdropping or peeping to invade someone's privacy. Court records show the charge was dismissed, but a judge issued a restraining order against him related to the case.
In Friday's shooting, the assailant entered the clinic and opened fire with a rifle, authorities said.
Police pursued the man into the building, trading gunfire with the suspect as authorities tracked his movements by watching video feeds from security cameras mounted inside. Police said officers managed to talk the gunman into giving himself up and he was taken into custody more than five hours after the violence began.
Those killed were a police officer and two civilians. All nine surviving victims - five police officers and four civilians - were listed in good condition at area hospitals.
The attack was the latest in a series of mass shootings around the country, including a 2012 massacre at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, that have galvanized supporters of tighter gun control. It is a polarizing issue in the United States, where the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution.
Expressing frustration, President Barack Obama said the United States needs make it harder for criminals and the mentally unstable to get guns, a theme that he has sounded repeatedly.
"We have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough," Obama said in a statement on Saturday.
ITEMS LEFT ON SCENE 'NO LONGER A THREAT'
The dead policeman was Garrett Swasey, 44, a campus police officer for the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs who joined city police in responding to the first reports of shots fired, authorities said. The dead civilians were not named.
Swasey, married and the father of two young children, was a former figure skater who served as an elder at Hope Chapel, the Colorado Springs church said on its website.
Planned Parenthood in recent years moved its Colorado Springs clinic to new quarters on the city's northwest side - a facility that opponents of abortion had called a "fortress."
The national non-profit group, devoted to providing a range of reproductive health services, including abortions, has come under renewed pressure this year from conservatives in Congress seeking to cut off federal funding for the organisation.
At least eight workers at clinics providing abortions have been killed since 1977, according to the National Abortion Federation - most recently in 2009, when doctor George Tiller was shot to death at church in Wichita, Kansas.
Clinics have reported nearly 7,000 incidents of trespassing, vandalism, arson, death threats, and other forms of violence since then, according to the federation.
As in much of the rest of the country, abortion is a divisive issue in Colorado. Colorado Springs is a hub for conservative Christian groups such as Focus on the Family that oppose abortion.
The issue figured prominently in attack ads during last year's U.S. Senate race between incumbent Democrat Mark Udall and Republican challenger Cory Gardner, who won the election.
(Additional reporting by Fiona Ortiz in Chicago, Daniel Wallis in Denver, Frank McGurty in New York and Roberta Rampton in Washington; Writing by Fiona Ortiz; Editing by Frances Kerry)
Colorado Springs shooting suspect Robert Lewis Dear. Photo: AP
A gunman who police say staged a deadly attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic was a recluse who stashed food in the woods, avoided eye contact, warned neighbours about government spying and passed out anti-Obama pamphlets, those who knew him said.
Authorities say Robert Lewis Dear, 57, killed three people, including a police officer, during an hours-long stand-off before surrendering at the Colorado Springs clinic. Police have not disclosed a motive, but the city's mayor, John Suthers, said people can make “inferences from where it took place”, referring to the clinic.
The facility provides women's health services, including abortions, and has long been the site of regular anti-abortion protests. A Roman Catholic priest who has held weekly Mass in front of the clinic for 20 years said Dear wasn't part of his group.
The attack thrust the clinic to the centre of the ongoing debate over Planned Parenthood. It was reignited in July when anti-abortion activists released undercover video they said showed the organisation's personnel negotiating the sale of fetal organs.
Planned Parenthood has denied seeking any payments beyond legally permitted reimbursement costs for donating the organs to researchers. Still, the National Abortion Federation, an association of service providers, says it has seen a rise in threats at clinics nationwide since the video's release.
At a vigil on Saturday at All Souls Unitarian Church, Rev. Nori Rost called the gunman a “domestic terrorist”. In the back of the room, someone held a sign that said: “Women's bodies are not battlefields. Neither is our town.”
Vicki Cowart, the regional head of Planned Parenthood, drew a standing ovation when she walked to the pulpit. She promised to quickly reopen the clinic.
“We will adapt. We will square our shoulders and we will go on,” she said.
After her remarks, a woman in the audience stood up, objected to the vigil becoming a “political statement” and left.
Cowart said the gunman “broke in” to the clinic Friday but didn't get past a locked door leading to the main part of the facility. She said there was no armed security when the shooting began.
In the parking lot of the two-story building, one man said the gunman shot at him as he pulled his car out, blasting two holes in his windshield. Inside, one worker ducked under a table and called her brother to tell him to take care of her kids if she was killed.
At one point, an officer whispered reports into his radio as he crept through the building. Others relayed information from surveillance cameras and victims in hiding. In the end, a six-year veteran University of Colorado police officer was killed. Two civilians also died, though their identities weren't immediately released. Five other officers and four people were hospitalised.
A Colorado Springs Police car blocks the entrance outside the Planned Parenthood clinic a day after the shooting. Photo: Reuters
Cowart said all 15 clinic employees survived and worked hard to make sure everyone else got into safe spaces and stayed quiet.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper said the city is mourning and praised the bravery of first responders. He said the nation is wrestling with the causes of violence but that it's too early to discuss that while the city is reeling.
“This is the kind of thing that hits the entire community in the gut,” he said.
Cowart said the organisation would learn from the attack. When asked if the clinic should have more security, she said the clinic's clients shouldn't have to walk through metal detectors.
The attack marked the latest mass shooting to stun the nation, and drew the now-familiar questions about a gunman's motives and whether anyone, from government to relatives, could have done anything to prevent an attack.
Those who knew Dear said he seemed to have few religious or political leanings. Neighbours who lived beside Dear's former South Carolina home say he hid food in the woods as if he was a survivalist and said he lived off selling prints of his uncle's paintings of Southern plantations and the Masters golf tournament.
John Hood said on Saturday that when he moved to Walterboro, Dear was living in a doublewide mobile home next door. Hood said Dear seemed to be a loner and very strange but not dangerous. He pointed to a wooden fence separating their land and said he put it up because Dear liked to skinny dip.
“He was really strange and out there, but I never thought he would do any harm,” he said.
Dear also lived part of the time in a cabin with no electricity or running water in Black Mountain, North Carolina. He kept mostly to himself, his neighbours said. When he did talk, it was a rambling combination of a number of topics that didn't make sense. He tended to avoid eye contact, said James Russell, who lived a few hundred feet down the mountain from Dear's cabin.
“If you talked to him, nothing with him was very cognitive,” Russell said.
In the small town of Hartsel, Colorado, about 96km west of Colorado Springs, about a dozen police vehicles and fire trucks were parked outside a small white trailer belonging to Dear located on a sprawling swath of land. Property records indicate Dear purchased the land about a year ago.
A law enforcement official said authorities searched the trailer on Saturday but found no explosives. The official, who has direct knowledge of the case, said authorities also talked with a woman who was living in the trailer. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorised to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation.
Zigmond Post, who lives near the RV where Dear lived, said he didn't have many interactions with Dear but he said the suspect once gave him a pamphlet opposing President Barack Obama.
