Over the next 11 minutes, the gunman–later identified as George Hennard, 35, an unemployed merchant seaman-coolly and methodically selected 45 terrified human targets from the lunchtime crowd at Luby’s. According to witnesses, the killer slowly worked his way around the dining room, muttering what seemed to be parting comments to each of his victims. He then shot them one by one from point-blank range. As the minutes ticked by, the cafeteria became a killing ground–a room filled with desperate men and women cowering amid the blood, bodies and shattered glass. The gunman, who carried two 9-mm pistols, paused only to reload. He showed mercy to only one person, a young woman with an infant. “Take the baby and get out,” Wink heard him say. The woman ran.
Wink found himself eye to eye with the killer, who was pointing a gun in his direction from 10 or 12 feet away. “Do I play dead? Do I get up and run?” Wink remembered thinking. Suddenly there was a loud crash from the rear of the restaurant as someone threw himself through a window. The gunman turned and saw a woman trying to escape. He shot her in the back-and Wink, seeing his chance, ran to an emergency exit and got out. Inside, the carnage continued. “I could still hear him firing,” Wink said. “I could see him deliberately going around, shooting people.”
Wink, trying to distract the gunman, taunted him from the building next door. “You missed me! You’re a bad shot!” he yelled. “If you don’t have the balls to shoot me, come on out and get me!” The killer walked toward the window facing Wink while behind him, other survivors in the restaurant began a mad rush for the door. The gunman turned and began shooting into the crowd. At this point, Wink said, a group of officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, who had been meeting in a nearby office, arrived and opened fire. The gunman, wounded four times by police bullets, retreated to a restroom and killed himself with a shot to the head. Witnesses said his pockets were full of ammunition. “He would have killed everyone if they hadn’t broken the glass and gotten out,” Wink said. “It was a nightmare.”
That was an understatement. In all, 22 people-14 women and eight men-were killed and 23 were wounded, making the Killeen massacre the worst shooting spree in U.S. history. (The previous record for a shooting incident, in San Ysidro, Calif., in 1984, was 21 deaths; 87 people died in an arson fire at the Happy Land nightclub in New York City in 1990.) Investigators could only guess about the motives for Hennard’s rampage, A deckhand on U.S.-owned cargo ships, Hennard lost his seaman’s license earlier this year after being charged with marijuana possession. He bought one of the two guns he used at Luby’s, an Austrian-made Glock semiautomatic pistol, within days of losing an appeal to have his license restored. His lawyer in Houston, David McCormack, said Hennard was concerned about losing his license but never exhibited a “propensity for violence” or bizarre behavior.
“Female Vipers’: Neighbors in Belton, Texas, where Hennard lived in a house owned by his mother, told a different story. One of them, Jane Bugg, described Hennard as an angry loner who seemed to have a problem with women. In June, Bugg said, Hennard sent a frightening letter to her daughters in which he railed against “treacherous female Vipers.” The letter, along with Hennard’s threatening behavior, led Bugg to file a complaint against Hennard to the Belton Police Department. The police, finding no evidence of a crime, declined to act, and Bugg said Hennard seemed to become more disturbed as the summer wore on getting into arguments and making obscene gestures as she and her daughters drove by. Last week’s news left Bugg infuriated. “If something had been done in June, those 22 people could have been saved,” she said. That was true enough-but-it was no consolation in a nation that seems to set new records for senseless violence with every passing year.
