Police have yet to name a motive behind Friday's Colorado Springs shooting spree at a Planned Parenthood clinic that claimed three lives and wounded nine. But the suspect, Robert L. Dear, 57, had a history of disputes with his neighbors and women.
In 2002, in Walterboro, S.C., Mr. Dear was arrested on charges of breaking the state’s “Peeping Tom” law after a neighbor told the police that he had hidden in the bushes in an attempt to peer into her house. For months, the neighbor, Lynn Roberts, said, Mr. Dear was “making unwanted advancements” and “leering” at her on a regular basis, putting her “in fear of her safety,” according to an incident report.
The charge was later dismissed, but a restraining order was issued. [...]
Mr. Dear’s harassment of his neighbor in South Carolina was not the first time a woman had complained about him.
Five years earlier, a woman believed to be his wife at the time, Pam Dear, accused him of taking her keys and locking her out of their home in Walterboro. When Ms. Dear climbed in through a window, she told the police, her husband “hit her and pushed her out the window,” leaving her with bruises. He also shoved her to the ground, according to the incident report.
The police said she did not want to file any charges, but simply “wanted something on record of this incident occurring.”
President Obama issued a statement about the tragedy—Colorado Springs' second mass shooting in the span of a couple weeks—urging the nation to "do something" about the pattern of gun violence.
On Saturday, President Obama again called on America to tackle gun violence. “This is not normal,” he said in a statement. “We can’t let it become normal. If we truly care about this — if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them.”
