.
The office manager of Central Family Medicine in Kansas City, Kansas, claims Roeder glued the clinic’s locks shut twice in the last month, including the day before Roeder allegedly assassinated Tiller. A police report was filed and the FBI contacted (the license plate number given to the FBI matched the one police were looking for following Tiller’s killing).
Crime Scene KC has a 1985 photo of Tiller after his clinic was bombed. They also link to a story in the Guardian that highlights why Tiller was so committed to his work.
Scott P. Roeder
Chilling details emerged about the suspect who is said to have suffered from bouts of mental illness.
Scott Roeder’s beliefs also came up in a custody battle in Pennsylvania. In 2003, Roeder sued for the right to visit a girl born the previous year. Roeder said he was the girl’s father.
The girl’s mother and her husband told the court they felt Roeder would not be a good influence on the child.
According to a court ruling filed in 2005, Roeder was earlier diagnosed with schizophrenia “for which he takes no medication, which may pose a clear and present danger to the female minor child.”
The child’s mother also brought up Roeder’s affiliations.
“… Past conduct and association with anti-government organizations is ongoing and poses a risk to her daughter,” the records said.
The child’s mother and her husband — who has raised the girl as his own since her birth — “feared that (Roeder) would kidnap and hide their daughter since he threatened to do so with his son.”
The factory worker was also said to have been outraged when Tiller was acquitted on abortion-related charges at a trial in March.
A letter threatening Tiller’s life had been reported to Wichita police May 4, but authorities would not say Monday whether it had any connection to Sunday’s shooting. Two days earlier, a staff member had reported extensive vandalism to Tiller’s clinic, Women’s Health Care Services. Tiller asked the FBI to investigate.
Saying good-bye to his son last Friday
Lindsey Roeder thought it was unusual that her ex-husband wanted to hang out with their grown son Friday evening.
Scott P. Roeder, 51, had always been adamant about his Old Testament beliefs and observed the Sabbath from Friday night through Saturday. Nothing could get in the way of that. Not soccer games when his son was younger. Nothing.
But last Friday was different. He wanted to take his 22-year-old son to see “Star Trek,” then to dinner. It was as though Roeder — who family said adopted extremist anti-government and anti-abortion views in the early 1990s — didn’t want the evening to end, Lindsey Roeder said.
≈ My previous diary — Person of Interest in Dr. Tiller’s Murder ≈
Very good diary, Oui, good to see better coverage than we get locally, having our news here in SE Michigan reduced to TV plus greatly diminished mostly-on-the-web newspapers.
One point: If Roeder has schizophrenia, this would not likely be a factor in what he did, unless he had a form of that terrible disease known as paranoid schizophrenia. Other kinds of schizophrenia, which are the kinds that most persons with the disease have, do not produce the complex delusional systems of belief that paranoid schizophrenics have. Sometimes – rarely – these delusional systems can push a person toward violence. However, persons with schizophrenia are not inherently dangerous and should not automatically be considered so, no matter what mental illness Roeder could have.
You, of course, do not say this in your diary. I simply don’t like the media’s tendency to make one person’s terrible behavior be thought a common sort of action that we need to fear in any other person who has schizophrenia.