Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (17 page)

Love you

Brother Jo Jo

And on his desk calendar, in the square for October 16, 1991, he scribbled: “Life has become a stalemate. There is simply no hope and not a prayer.”

DURING THE LUNCH HOUR ON OCTOBER 16, 1991, AN ANGRY AND PARANOID GEORGE HENNARD CRASHED HIS FORD PICKUP THROUGH THE GLASS WINDOWS OF LUBY’S CAFETERIA IN KILLEEN, TEXAS, AND BEGAN HIS METHODICAL SLAUGHTER OF THE SHOCKED DINERS INSIDE.
Texas Department of Public Safety

SETTING THINGS RIGHT

So it wasn’t hope Hennard carried. Instead, he stuffed a pack of Bristol cigarettes and four preloaded clips of 9 mm ammunition in his pockets, along with a fistful of loose cartridges. With two semiautomatic pistols and more than a hundred rounds, he was ready.

At 11:50 a.m., Hennard backed his Ford Ranger out of his driveway in Belton and soon turned onto Sparta Road toward US-190. In less than a half hour, he’d be in Killeen to set things right.

More than 150 diners jammed the Luby’s dining room on this Wednesday lunch hour. A few were Suzanna’s friends and patients, whom she greeted warmly as she came in. One of the benefits of living in a safe, small town.

The serving line was long and the Gratias’ usual table by the restaurant’s front windows was occupied, so they claimed a table on the far side of the dining room, beside a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Manager Mark Kopenhaffe
joined them for lunch, sitting across from Suzanna, who he bantered about politics with while keeping one eye on the unrelenting stream of hungry people who continued to spill through the front door. It was going to be a big day. One for the books.

A little after 12:30 p.m., the swollen serving line slowed almost to a stop and several tables hadn’t been bused, yet customers were still coming. Mark excused himself and went to the cashier’s counter to speed things along.

The Gratias had eaten their fill and chatted idly while waiting to thank Mark for lunch. At 12:39, mellow Muzak played above the collective hum of friendly diners and the soft clinking of silverware in the dining hall. Hanging pothos plants, potted palms, the gentleness of pastel mauve and emerald green colors, and the sheer draperies softened the feel of a corporate cafeteria, made it innocuous and homey.

So at first, the startling crash was presumed to be a busboy who had dropped a big stack of dishes, usually the worst calamity to befall most commercial eateries such as this one. But when everyone in the place wheeled around to see not a pile of broken plates but a monstrous blue pickup truck exploding through the plate-glass windows and into the carpeted dining room, smashing tables, chairs, and people in a slicing shower of glass before coming to a stop twenty feet into the crowded restaurant …well, reason twisted in upon itself.

An accident!
Suzanna thought as she rose from her chair to help. Somebody lost control of his truck and crashed into the restaurant. Maybe a heart attack! Maybe he needed help!

A few Samaritans rushed toward the truck to aid the driver. One was reaching for the door handle when the driver thrust his left arm out his open driver-side window and fired a gun four times into the serving line, and fired another with his right hand out the rolled-down passenger window. And before the driver’s would-be rescuer knew what was happening, he had been shot three times. He died instantly.

“This is for the women of Belton!” the shooter yelled as he leaped from the truck, a Bristol cigarette still between his lips.

It’s a robbery!
Suzanna suddenly thought.
They’re going to come for our purses!
She could hear the
pop-pop-pop
of gunfire, but her view was blocked by the truck, which sat just twenty feet away between her and the shooter. Suddenly, Al turned their table on its side and they crouched behind their meager breastwork, but Suzanna had to watch. She had to know.

After the first burst of pandemonium, an eerie silence fell on the entire tan-colored room as George Hennard began shooting the people closest to his truck, then hunting down others. The killing was easy. People hid under their tables, cowering and trying desperately to make themselves small, invisible,
but they couldn’t make themselves small enough. Isolated cries erupted with each shot, then died.

“This is for what Bell County did to me and my family!” he shouted cryptically as he fired at anyone who stood or fled. “This is payback! Was it worth it? Was it worth it?”

Suzanna saw his face for the first time less than a minute after he crashed through the window; it was intent and calm. Hennard came around the front of his truck toward her, stopping to aim point-blank at a wounded man’s head and pulling the trigger. He shot another one, then another one. Always in the head.

What’s wrong with this guy?
Suzanna’s rational brain was spinning, trying to make sense of the bedlam. Like so many women who’d crossed paths with George Hennard, she was sucked into the paradox of his handsome looks and his behavior, which people often don’t associate with beauty.
He’s not bad looking. What could be so wrong? I’d go out with him
…

Suzanna reached for her purse lying a couple
feet away, but she realized to her horror that
her Smith & Wesson wasn’t in there. It was safely
under her passenger seat a hundred feet away,
and a lunatic killer stood between them.

Then the ghastliness of his purpose dawned on her. This wasn’t a robbery. It was a mass murder, like the one she remembered had happened at that McDonald’s in California seven years before. She had thought at the time she would have been able to shoot Huberty with her gun if she was there that day. Now here was this freak, methodically slaughtering frightened people as calmly as an altar boy lights candles, and he would kill everyone unless he was stopped.

She had a gun! She had a clear shot, a place to steady her aim, and he was less than six paces from her. She’d dropped smaller targets much farther away. She couldn’t miss.

“WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!”

I’ve got him!
she thought.

Suzanna reached for her purse lying a couple feet away in the warm goo of her uneaten chicken tetrazzini—but then realized to her horror, even before she lifted it from the congealing mess, that her Smith & Wesson wasn’t in there. It was safely under her passenger seat a hundred feet away, and a lunatic killer stood between them.

“Wait till those fucking women in Belton see this!” Hennard hollered as he shot into a group of school teachers. “I wonder if they’ll think it was worth it!”

IN THE BLOODY AFTERMATH OF GEORGE HENNARD’S RAMPAGE INSIDE LUBY’S CAFETERIA, A PHONE RANG ENDLESSLY AND MUZAK PLAYED SOFTLY OVER THE CARNAGE.
Texas Department of Public Safety

There was no time for regret. Suzanna began to consider her other alternatives, all bad. She thought of breaking the window and running but knew it would only call attention in her direction. She thought of stabbing the gunman with a steak knife, throwing a saltshaker at his head, whacking him with her goopy purse while he inserted a fresh clip at the next table.

“The women of Belton and Killeen are vipers,” Hennard shouted as he pumped three bullets into the chest of Kitty Davis, a new grandmother who’d come to celebrate a former coworker’s engagement.

Hennard prowled the floor, cool and deliberate, executing crouching patrons point-blank in the head or chest, pausing only to rack new clips into his guns. Witnesses later said he often passed over men to shoot women.

The entire restaurant was eerily silent, except for the
pop-pop-pop
of Hennard’s guns and his profane ranting. Frightened diners hid the best they could, sometimes protected by nothing more than their hands covering their heads, hoping not to attract the killer’s attention. Paralyzed by fear. Waiting quietly to die.

“I have to do something,” Al Gratia told his daughter as they hid behind their overturned table. “If I don’t, he’ll kill everyone in the restaurant!”

“Yeah, and he’ll kill you, too, you son of a bitch!” she screamed as she clung for dear life to her father’s golf shirt. She kept waiting for a cop to take the
killer down. A seventy-one-year-old man shouldn’t be the one. Where were the cops? There were always cops in here!

Al had been a crew chief for a U.S. Army Air Corps bomber squadron in World War II, but he was no John Wayne. He didn’t own guns and didn’t fish because he couldn’t inflict pain on the fish. He taught his children how to shoot with a BB gun, but after Suzanna’s brother killed a mourning dove, nobody picked up the gun ever again.

Al just couldn’t sit and watch people die, one by one, at the hands of a lone madman. And he knew his wife and daughter would die, too, if he didn’t act.

In a split second, Hennard turned away and Al leaped out of his daughter’s grasp. He’d taken only a few steps when Hennard turned back and shot him once in the chest. Al dropped onto his side in the narrow aisle and groaned. He was alive but mortally wounded—and Suzanna knew it.

Instead of coming for Suzanna and her mother, Hennard turned to his right and picked up the systematic slaughter in the front area of the cafeteria. Later, she would realize that her father’s body probably blocked Hennard’s path to them, and with so many other targets, it wasn’t worth the trouble of Hennard making his way to them.

Hennard moved back to the serving area, where many people tried to hide.

“You trying to hide from me, bitch?” he yelled at a woman huddled in a corner just before he killed her.

He emptied his Ruger into several more people with a cool affect. When he used up all his preloaded Ruger clips, he just set the useless gun on a plate of fried chicken and hush puppies and continued to kill with his Glock.

Returning to the center of the dining room to investigate a mysterious heavy thud, Hennard cornered Olgica Taylor and her daughter Anica McNeil, who clutched her four-year-old daughter Lakeichha.

“Tell people I ain’t killing no babies today!” Hennard shouted. “Tell everyone Bell County was bad.”

He stepped aside to let Anica and her child flee, and when the young mother wavered, he yelled again, “Get out of here before I kill you both!”

Then he shot Olgica in the face before making another pass through the dining room, killing others as he circled.

In the chaos, people tried desperately to hide. One woman hid in a walk-in freezer and was later treated for hypothermia. A teenage food preparer curled inside an industrial dishwasher and didn’t come out until the next day. Some got away, but most were frozen by their fear, trapped like rats in a box.

Suddenly, another explosion of glass rattled the restaurant, this time from the back. Suzanna feared it might be a second attack by an accomplice, but it wasn’t. A 6-foot-6, 300-pound (about-2-meter, 136-kilogram) mechanic named Tommy Vaughan, a Luby’s regular, had thrown his linebacker body
through one of the immense windows at the rear of the dining room, and panicked diners now frantically scrambled behind him through the jagged glass.

“Mom, we have to get out of here!” Suzanna yelled, but Suzy had just watched her husband of nearly fifty years gunned down. She was frozen by fear, slumped against the window. Suzanna stood and turned her back to the gunman, fully expecting to feel the thump of a bullet as she lifted her mother to her knees. She knew she’d only feel the impact at first. The burning pain would come later.

“You’ve got to follow me, Mom!” she commanded as she sprinted toward the open window, stumbling over someone and losing a shoe as she fell headlong into a bramble of glass shards outside. Blood streamed from cuts on her hands and arms as she ran, with one bloody, bare foot, across the asphalt toward Mark Kopenhaffe, who’d just emerged from an emergency exit.