The man who turned a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic into a bloodbath is a surly, oddball loner who conversed little and picked fights with his wife and neighbors.
Robert Lewis Dear, 57, had lived in tiny Hartsel, Colo., for a year before Friday, when he traveled the 90 minutes to Colorado Springs and killed three people, including Garrett Swasey, 44, a University of Colorado cop, in a five-hour standoff with police.
The shooter, who is due in court Monday, has roots in the Carolinas and a criminal record that includes arrests on animal cruelty and peeping Tom charges. He wasn’t convicted in either case.
Dear once lived in a tiny, yellow shack in the North Carolina woods, where neighbor James Russell said he mostly kept to himself. “If you talked to him, nothing with him was very cognitive — topics all over the place,” Russell said.
A pair of sticks hung in the shape of a cross on the side of the small cabin, but Dear never talked about religion, or abortion, Russell said.
In the late 1990s, Dear lived in South Carolina, where he frequently feuded with neighbors.
He once left his wife bruised in a bizarre 1997 incident in which he locked her out of their home — and then hit and pushed her when she tried to enter through a window, according to reports.
In 2002, a neighbor in Walterboro, SC, who had long feuded with Dear, told police he was outside with his son when “a shot was fired from the residence next to his.”
Suddenly, the man’s dog “yelped out loud and ran over to him,” according to cops, who noted the dog appeared to have been shot with a pellet gun.
Dear denied taking aim at the animal but told police the neighbor “was lucky that it was only a pellet that hit the dog and not a bigger round,” reports by BuzzFeed and the Daily Beast said.
That same year, another neighbor filed police reports against Dear after he made several unwanted advances and was caught staring through the window of her house.
In Colorado, neighbor Zigmund Post said he spoke to Dear after trying to retrieve his dogs, who had gotten loose near Dear’s Hartsel home.
“We were there for a minute, and the guy was already handing us anti-Obama pamphlets,” he said, adding Dear told him that “Obama was ruining the country and needed to be impeached.”
Dear wasn’t talking when he walked up to the Planned Parenthood clinic Friday, witnesses said. Authorities on Saturday wouldn’t discuss Dear’s motive, but Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers said at a news conference that people could make “inferences from where it took place.”
Dear walked into the clinic and opened fire, said Planned Parenthood worker Kentanya Craion, who told NBC Dear “seemed calm, but crazy” and was “mumbling and ranting while he was shooting.”
Craion at first didn’t realize shots were being fired.
“I couldn’t register because it felt so surreal,” she said. She fled into a room and hid with a colleague and a patient, propping an exam bed up against the door for five hours.
With Post Wires
