Sniper well known to police

Press, 27 February 1984, Page 1

Sniper well known to police

NZPA-AP Los Angeles A sniper who sprayed a schoolyard with rifle fire, killing one girl and wounding 12 people before turning his gun on himself, abused drugs, drank heavily, and had lived in “unremitting bleakness” since his parents died in the Jonestown mass suicide, said the police and acquaintances. Tyrone Mitchell, who killed himself after the 15minute sniping attack on Friday, had himself followed the Rev. Jim Jones’s cult to South America but was seeing a dentist the day 912 people drank poisoned punch and died, said a lawyer who represented Mitchell after the 1978 mass suicide. Children screamed and scattered on Friday afternoon as Mitchell, aged 28, from his second-floor apartment in a house across the street, opened fire on the crowded playground of the 49th Street elementary school just as classes emptied for the week-end. “At first I thought it was a firecracker. Then I saw some dirt jump,” said Shawn Williams, aged 10, whose sister was wounded.

A vice-principal’s warning to “get down” sent Shawn flopping to the ground. As he lay there, he saw Shala Uebanks, aged 10, struck by a fatal blast. “Shala was by the stairs. She started running, and then looked back. I saw her fall,” Shawn said. The police found Mitchell dead, killed by a self-in-flicted gunshot wound, when they broke down the door to his white Victorian house. Mitchell was “a well known suspect with the Newton police division for his irrational behaviour ...

and a user of PCP,” a hallucinogenic drug known to cause wildly aggressive behaviour, said Deputy Folic Chief Lew Ritter.

Mr Marcus Topel, a lawyer, said Mitchell bad gone to Guyana in 1977 and was “severely affected by the loss of his family ... He had gone down there as an idealistic young man looking for Utopia, and instead he ended up with unremitting bleakness.” Mitchell “was seeing a dentist in Georgetown on the day of the suicides,” November 18, 1978, Mr Topel said. “He was too ill to return to Jonestown, so he lived.”

Mitchell’s fiancee, Mary Lou Hill, aged 29, told reporters on Friday that Mitchell’s parents, grandmother, four sisters, and a brother died in Guyana. Mitchell later suffered a nervous breakdown, said Mr Topel and Miss Hill. Willie Lee Mitchell, Tyrone’s uncle who lived in the first-floor apartment, said the police “were supposed to arrest him four or five days ago,” although the uncle did not say why his nephew was sought.

Nine of the wounded were children aged nine to 11. The other two were Albert Jones, aged 50, a playground supervisor, who tried to help the children, and Carlos Lopez, aged 24, a bystander.