He was just a regular chap who blended in well within the community. Had some issue with the city council and mayor, some issues of domestic violence, threatened a lawyer with bodily harm … just nothing that stood out he was capable of turning a gun on people and himself. Just one average Joe from Alabama with perhaps some mental issues explaining his behavior .. he wasn’t understood by neighbours, family anf friends. It wasn’t his fault … what a bunch of illiterate dudes. Houser was a trainwreck waiting to happen.
Theater gunman built reputation as an angry provocateur who didn’t like to be crossed | AP Big News |
In 2014, facing eviction from his Alabama home, John Russell Houser set out to make sure no one else could ever live in that house. He poured concrete down the drains and cemented the fuse box shut. He splattered paint and human waste all over the walls.
The new owners found Houser had it booby-trapped: the gas starter tube in the fireplace was twisted out and ignited, the logs removed. “He was hoping the house would catch on fire. That’s what the investigators told me,” said Norman Bone, 77, who had bought the house for his daughter.
The man Bone once knew as a church-going neighbor had grown into someone better known by neighbors and colleagues as an angry provocateur. Police say his anger culminated Thursday night in a slaughter at The Grand 16 theater in Lafayette, Louisiana, leaving two women dead and nine other people hurt.
For decades, Houser lived and worked in the same area where he owned that home, in Phenix City and the surrounding cities. Since the early ’90s, he had built a reputation as an oddball. It was then that he regularly appeared on a local television show, appearing opposite a Democrat as a radical Republican railing against women in the workplace and calling for violence against abortion providers.
“He made a lot of wild accusations,” said Calvin Floyd, who hosted the show on WLTZ-TV in Columbus for more than two decades. “He could make the phones ring.”
Yet Houser had a dark side that went way beyond talk. In 1989, court records say, he was accused of hiring someone to burn down a Columbus lawyer’s law office. His wife and other relatives filed papers accusing him of domestic violence in 2008.
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He told the newspaper he was “completely against” the Nazi philosophy but chose the symbol because it represents a government’s ability to do what it wants.“The people who used it — the Nazis — they did what they damn well pleased,” Houser told the newspaper, accusing police officers of lying on the stand during his trial.
It was not the last time he’d invoke that type of imagery, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, said he’d been on the group’s radar since 2005.
Last January, he wrote on one online forum: “Hitler is loved for the results of his pragmatism.” He also posted on a forum dedicated to the New York chapter of Golden Dawn, Greece’s far-right neo-Nazi political party.
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Pub owner John Russell Houser walks down Mail Street under a banner he is displaying showing swastika and "Welcome to LaGrange" text. .(Nat Gurley/LaGrange Daily News)John Russell `Rusty’ Houser walks down Main Street on July 27, 2001 next to his bar, Rusty’s Buckhead Pub, which displays a banner with a swastika reading ‘Welcome to LaGrange’ to compare a then-recent LaGrange City Council decision to pull his alcohol license to Nazi tactics. The council pulled his license after repeated convictions of serving alcohol to minors. Houser on Thursday shot and killed two people in a Lousiana movie theater before turning the gun on himself. An article clipping from LaGrange Daily News, April 28, 2001 documents the John Russell `Rusty’ Houser placing a banner showing swastika and “Welcome to LaGrange” on his pub.
Louisiana theater shooter had ties to LaGrange
LaGRANGE — A 59-year-old man who shot and killed two people before turning the gun on himself in a Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater Thursday evening had ties to Troup County and was once prosecuted for serving alcohol to minors while operating a bar in downtown LaGrange.
John Russell “Rusty” Houser was prosecuted in Troup County State Court in February 2001 on three counts on furnishing alcohol to minors while operating Rusty’s Buckhead Pub, 314 Main St., court and city records show. The building is no longer standing but was located next to the former Westbrook Tire building.
Houser was found guilty Feb. 23, 2001 of selling beers to underage informants for the LaGrange Police Department on June 15 and 28 of 2000. One of the individuals to whom he sold beer was former LPD Officer Chris Vines.
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In an April 28, 2001 article in the Daily News, Houser said he used the swastika to symbolize the menthods of witnesses who testified against him and the LaGrange police officers whom he claimed lied on the witness stand to convict him of selling alcohol to minors.An investigation in 2001 by the National Institute of Ethics, a police certifying organization, found no wrongdoing by police during the alcohol-sale investigation.
“On the occasions I spoke with him, he was aggravated,” Dekmar remembered of Houser. “He was aggravated and adament that the system didn’t work as it should and unwilling to accept the consequences of his own behavior. Sometime after that, I learned he had moved to Columbus.”
