Man shoots 7 children, 6 adults

Press, 27 September 1982, Page 1

Man shoots 7 children, 6 adults

NZPA Wilkes-Barre ? ; . Pennsylvania ; A prison guard went on a - shooting rampage in two communities, possibly because of a child-custody dispute, killing seven children and six adults-before surrendering Jo the police, officials said. ' . Five of the victims were his children by four of the women: killed., and all the others, except a passer-by, were known ' to him, the police said.. One man was critically wounded in the attack on two . homes in Wilkes-Barre, ,a depressed coalmining town, and nearby Jenkins township. Two boys managed to escape unharmed. The gunman, identified as George Banks, aged 40, had once served a jail sentence . for attempted robbery, but had'spent the last two years as an armed guard in a prison. Banks told three police officer friends, “Don't shoot,”

as he surrendered after a seven-hour stand-off. Dressed in olive-drab military-style, overalls and a fatigue cap, Banks handed a rifle out of a window of a vacant house where he had been holed up since dawn. The police said the motive ' was in doubt, but the Mayor of Wilkes-Barre, Mr Thomas , McLaughlin, said the police were looking into reports that the shooting might have been prompted by a child custody dispute. • Two of Banks’s lawyers in the custody case, Messrs Joseph Gasper and Joseph Sklarosky, said Banks and the mother of one of his children had agreed to a custody arrangement but that the woman had not complied. Seven children ranging in age from one to 11 arid six adults, five of them women, died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head and body at the residences, about eight kilometres apart.