'It's time to destroy Trump & Co.': Scalise shooter raged on Facebook
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The 66-year-old Illinois man who opened fire early Wednesday on members of Congress practicing for a charity baseball game had raged against President Trump and once singled out House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who was wounded in the attack.
"Here's a Republican that should lose his job, but they gave him a raise,'' James T. Hodgkinson allegedly wrote in a 2015 post to his Facebook account, referring to the Louisiana congressman. The message was accompanied by a cartoon depiction of Scalise.
Along with Scalise, Hodgkinson shot and wounded Capitol Hill police officers Crystal Griner and David Bailey, House staff member Zach Barth and Tyson Foods lobbyist Matt Mika. The gunman targeted people at a Republican congressional baseball team practice.
Federal authorities said it was too early to determine whether the assault targeted members of Congress. But Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., raised the ominous prospect that the incident may have been politically motivated, saying that a man who appeared to match Hodgkinson's description approached him and others in the parking lot of the Alexandria, Va., baseball field to ask whether the practice involved Republicans or Democrats.
"Now that I've seen the (suspect's) photo, I've got to believe that he was the guy,'' DeSantis said on MSNBC.
Hodgkinson had a lengthy arrest record and had apparently been living out of his car since arriving here in March. He died at a local hospital from multiple gunshot wounds suffered when officers returned fire on the rifle-weilding Belleville, Ill., home-inspection contractor, the FBI said.
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In a March 22 Facebook post, Hodgkinson turned his ire against Trump, who he described as a "traitor.''
"Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy,'' he said. "It's Time to Destroy Trump & Co."
In a post earlier this week, the suspect highlighted a campaign calling for the president's impeachment.
"Trump is Guilty & Should Go to Prison for Treason,'' Hodgkinson wrote.
A home inspector
Illinois business records show that the suspect owned JTH Inspections, which he claimed to have operated for more than 30 years.
A past member of the American Society of Home Inspectors, Hodgkinson's membership ended in 2015, according to a statement from the group.
Hodkinson, described in court records as 5-feet, 6-inches tall and weighing 202 pounds, also had a record of arrests on various criminal charges dating back to 1988, according to St. Clair County, Ill., Circuit Court documents.
The charges ranged from minor driving offenses and repeated failures to obtain work permits to battery and driving under the influence.
Records show that the 2006 battery case, which resulted in his arrest, was later dismissed after a period of "supervision.''
Hodgkinson's 1992 arrest by Illinois State Police for suspicion of resisting and obstructing a peace officer also was later dismissed.
None of the offenses involved a weapon.
But St. Clair County, Ill., Sheriff Richard Watson, whose deputies were assisting federal investigators in a search of the gunman's Belleville home, said deputies last encountered Hodgkinson March 24, when a neighbor reported that gun shots were being fired in the area.
The sheriff said deputies arrived to find Hodgkinson with a hunting rifle on his property where he was apparently engaged in target practice.
“The guy was very cordial,’’ the sheriff said. “He showed the deputy his firearms identification card. Even though he was on his own property, he told the deputy that he probably should take the rifle to a gun range, just to be safe.’’
At no time, Watson said, did Hodgkinson’s behavior appear erratic or threatening.
Watson said he learned of Hodgkinson’s connection to the Virginia shooting shortly after 9:30 a.m., when he arrived at the department for a meeting.
“I about fell out of my chair,’’ Watson said, adding that local authorities then began to search their files for records of past contacts with the shooter.
In the March encounter, Watson described Hodgkinson’s weapon as a common deer rifle. A federal law enforcement official, however, said investigators had recovered an assault-style rifle and a handgun that were believed to be associated with the suspect.
Contempt for GOP politics
In Belleville, while FBI and ATF agents continued to search the gunman's home set on a country road just outside the city limits, neighbors were recalling mixed encounters with Hodgkinson.
Fred Widel, who lives on an adjacent property, said that Hodgkinson mostly kept to himself but was not unfriendly.
Widel said in the three years he has lived next to Hodgkinson he would give his family pecans from a tree in the front yard, while the gunman's wife would bring over vegetables they grew on their sprawling property. Widel described him as "even-tempered" and neighborly.
Hodgkinson had posted Bernie Sanders signs in the yard, but Widel said neither of them ever brought up the subject of politics.
Several months ago he said Hodgkinson, who went by "Tom," told him that he was retiring and was looking to sell some of his tools and a truck.
"He said he was getting older and it was getting harder to move around and was ready to retire," Widel recalled.
"I ended up buying a biscuit joiner from him, though I could have gotten a better deal elsewhere," he added. "I thought it was the right thing to do for a neighbor."
Another neighbor, Bill Schaumleffel, said that he had few interactions with Hodgkinson in the more than 15 years they lived near each other, before alerting the sheriff in March to gunfire near the Hodgkinson home.
Schaumleffel said he became concerned when he saw Hodgkinson shooting a rifle behind the house. At the time, Schaumleffel said he was playing in the backyard with his two young grandchildren on an unseasonably warm March day
Schaumleffel said his wife, Karmen, hustled the children into the house after Hodgkinson didn't appear to hear him yell for him to stop the gunfire.
"I decided to call the the sheriff, because I didn't want to risk going over there and getting into a big argument with him," Schaumleffel said. "In all those years, we didn't really have that much interaction with him."
Another neighbor, Cheri Borsch, said that she called the sheriff's department on multiple occasions in 2015 and 2016 to report that she heard rapid gunfire in the general vicinity of Hodgkinson's home. She said deputies came to investigate but brushed it off as probably someone shooting fireworks.
"In the country, it's not unusual to hear gunfire, but not pop pop pop," she said. "After a while you feel like that you are wasting their time, so you stop calling. They say to stay vigilant but then when you are it's not taken seriously."
Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., said his office had been contacted several times by Hodgkinson.
"I've received a lot of questions today regarding James Hodgkinson and his interaction with my congressional office," Bost said in a statement. "Mr. Hodgkinson contacted my office 10 times, beginning in June 2016 and continuing through May of this year. While he continuously express his opposition to the Republican agenda in Congress, the correspondence never appeared threatening or raised concerns that anger would turn to physical action."
Hodgkinson, an ardent supporter of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, also made no effort to hide a simmering contempt for Republican politics.
In a series of 2012 letters to the local Belleville News-Democrat, the gunman offered scathing critiques of GOP policies, focusing largely on tax issues.
"I have never said 'life sucks,' only the policies of the Republicans,'' he wrote on Aug. 28, 2012.
The next month, he cited the MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show as one of his favorite television programs, adding that a recent show had highlighted the contributions of 17 wealthy donors to the Republican Party.
"These men are trying to buy our country,'' he wrote. "You know they expect something for all this money. That something is that (then-GOP presidential candidate) Mitt Romney and a Republican Congress won't raise their taxes.''
Hodgkinson appeared to express his most extreme political views on Facebook, where he took particular aim at Trump and the president's family.
Donald Johnson of Ann Arbor, Mich., said he became Facebook friends with the suspect last February.
“I was friending a lot of Bernie supporters at the time,” he said. He never met Hodgkinson in person, he said, but they exchanged memes over Facebook.
“We never even messaged,” he said, “but he liked a lot of my posts.”
“He seemed kind of extreme,” said Johnson of Hodgkinson’s Facebook posts, referring to him as a “Bernie-bot.”
Johnson said he has been scrolling through his wall since learning that Hodgkinson had been identified as the shooter, wondering if any of his posts may have negatively affected the gunman’s behavior. Johnson recalled posting something in January about the on-camera slugging of white nationalist Richard Spencer, intimating he understood why someone would resort to such an attack.
“If [Hodgkinson] was reading that, he could have taken that as a go-ahead, I suppose,” he said.
But Johnson said he has "never advocated for violence.''
"I think violence is wrong,'' he said.
Federal authorities said it was still too early to determine what drove Hodgkinson to target such a gathering, hundreds of miles from his home. Timothy Slater, who is leading the FBI's investigation, said authorities believe that the suspect had arrived in the area sometime in March and had been living out of a white cargo van parked near the baseball field.
Hodgkinson was known to have frequented the Alexandria YMCA, adjacent to the baseball field, for more than a month, said former Alexandria Mayor Bill Euille.
Euille said he regularly encountered the man in the lobby of the YMCA, sitting at a table drinking coffee and using his laptop computer. Hodgkinson asked Euille about local restaurants, but the former mayor did not know where the man had been living. Euille said he did not make the connection between his regular acquaintance at the YMCA and the shooting until he saw photographs of the gunman shortly after the assault.
The former mayor said there were "never any signs or indications that something was troubling him."
"This morning he just became a different person,'' Euille said. He said that a YMCA employee told him that the suspect had been at the facility Wednesday morning, and then departed shortly before the shooting began.
Witnesses, meanwhile, said the attack and the barrage of gunfire seemed to come from nowhere.
One witness said she never saw the attacker's face but cowered in fear as the sound of the gunshots appeared to come closer, as she walked her dogs near the baseball field.
At first, Katie Filous said she thought the noise was related to a pitching machine at the field before hearing screams from the people gathered there.
"They were screaming, 'It's a shooter! He's got a rifle! Get down!' I laid down on the ground. There were a lot of shots. Maybe about 20."
From her vantage point behind a tree, she saw a security officer leave a nearby SUV and attempt to confront the shooter with a handgun.
"I saw the officer get hit, kind of slumping near the SUV," Filous said. "I saw two people being carried away on stretchers. The (wounded) officer was airlifted out.
"I was doing what I could to not get killed."
Contributing: Emily Bohatch and Sarah Toy.
