Richard Dunn

French murderer and suicide, a citizen who regularly attended municipal council meetings but never spoke up. According to his 68-year-old mother, he was deeply disturbed, had been in psychiatric treatment for years and had spoken "probably 10 to 20 times of wanting to kill people. "The reason why I think he wanted to kill was because he felt very alone," she told reporters outside her home. "When he first went into psychotherapy in 1990, he asked the doctor: 'Help me to die." On 3/27/2002, c. 1:15 AM, after sitting silently through a six-hour council meeting in Nanterre (a Paris suburb), Dunn rose and started firing two semiautomatic Glock pistols, methodically killing eight city officials and wounding 19 more people. The shooter was also packing a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, which he did not use. Dunn was restrained by witnesses after an official threw a chair at him. The official was seriously wounded when Dunn managed to free one of his hands and continued firing. When police arrived, the rampaging man begged them to kill him. Unemployed, Dunn had trouble keeping jobs. For several years he worked at a nearby elementary school as a hall monitor; he also volunteered at the Human Rights League. He was described by acquaintances as a sympathizer of ecological organizations, but was not a member of the Green Party. In letters addressed to acquaintances a few days before the rampage, Dunn wrote: "I am crazy. I have become a tramp. So I must die." In another paragraph he reiterated his intention to "kill people and commit suicide" thereby "destroying his mother psychologically." On 3/28/2002 at about 10:15 AM while being questioned at the Paris headquarters of the Brigade criminelle where he was detained, Dunn rushed toward the fourth-floor window, struggled out of the grasp of two officers who tried to pull him back and jumped to his death.