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NJ Gun Spree Killer Dies After 60 Year Incarceration [View All]

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Libertas1776 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Oct-21-09 07:35 AM
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NJ Gun Spree Killer Dies After 60 Year Incarceration
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From the NY Times (Oct 19, 2009) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/nyregion/20unruh.html

Howard Unruh, who carried out one of America’s most infamous mass shootings, killing 13 people, three of them children, in a 20-minute, seemingly emotionless stroll through his neighborhood in Camden, N.J., in September 1949, died Monday at a nursing home in Trenton after 60 years’ confinement. He was 88.His death was announced by Warren W. Faulk, the Camden County prosecutor. James Laughlin, a spokesman for the prosecutor, said Mr. Unruh had been in state custody since his arrest.


On the morning of September 6, 1949, began his murderous spree with the killing of his first victim, a local shoemaker.

“I had leveled the gun at him, neither of us said nothing, and I pulled the trigger,” Mr. Unruh told a psychiatrist a month later. “He had a funny look on his face, staggered back and fell to the floor. I realized then he was still alive, so I fired into his head.” Next, he went to a tailor shop looking for the owner, Thomas Zegrino, but instead shot the man’s wife, Helga, 28, who was there alone.Then he entered a barber shop and shot Orris Smith, 6, who was astride a white hobby horse, getting his hair cut as his mother, Catherine, sat beside him.The barber, Clark Hoover, 33, was the next victim. In his confession, Mr. Unruh told how the man had “dodged around the barber chair, making it difficult for me to get a clear shot, but I finally hit him, walked over and then shot into his head.”


Unruh went on to murder 9 more people, including two more children, with most being random targets that happened to "cross his path" (including driving by in a car, stopped at a red light, and looking out a window) at the wrong time.


"After the shootings, Mr. Unruh fled to his apartment, where some 50 police officers converged there and blazed away with machine guns, shotguns and pistols. Mr. Unruh's apartment. A search of his room turned up 700 cartridges, a book called "The Shooter's Bible" and a New Testament Bible."

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A deeply disturbed SOB is now dead, and the final chapter of a relatively forgotten massacre can be closed, finally.


To paraphrase Mark Twain: History Doesn't repeat itself in America...but it does rhyme. :scared:
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