Shoulda shot himself first

Robert McFadden has an article in The New York Times about the Geisenheyner case:

At a sprawling, tree-shaded country house in rural Pennsylvania, a place of serenity that most city dwellers can only dream about as a retreat from the mean streets, two weekending couples, one with a two-year-old boy, were relaxing on Saturday night when the nightmare strode in from the darkness.
He was a bull-necked career criminal with a record for robbery, burglary and insurance fraud in New York and Massachusetts— mug shots show a brutish face framed by long flowing hair— and he had a .22-caliber pistol. Officials identified him as Mark Richard Geisenheyner, 51, and said he was bent on revenge. “Guess you never thought you’d see me again,” he said to Paul Shay, 64, a New York City plumber who, with his wife, Monica, 58, an associate professor at the Pratt Institute, lives in the East Village in Manhattan and jointly owns the country retreat near Bechtelsville, Pennsylvania, thirty miles northwest of Philadelphia.
The gunman shot everybody in the head, starting with Mr. Shay, whom he knew from a 2006 insurance dispute that involved Mr. Shay’s home, according to the Montgomery County, Pennsylvania district attorney, Risa Vetri Ferman, who cited accounts from two survivors.
Killed outright were Paul Shay’s nephew, Joseph Shay, 43, of Yarmouth, Massachusetts and New York City, and the child, Gregory Bosco Erdmann. Critically wounded were the boy’s mother, Kathryn Erdmann, 37, of Fall River, Massachusetts, described as Joseph’s girlfriend, and Paul and Monica Shay.
Despite her wound, the authorities said, Ms. Erdmann was able, about 10:30 p.m., to call 911. Kevin R. Steele, the first assistant district attorney in Montgomery County, reviewed the 911 tapes and described a horrific account from Ms. Erdmann. It was, he said, “the mother of the two-year-old calling for help,” adding: “It’s a haunting tape where she says that she was shot. She’s covered in blood and she is pleading for help for her son.” Mr. Steele said he could not say why the man had shot the toddler, but gave an account of how it happened. “He puts the gun and shot the two-year-old, who was asleep in a bed, and he shot the child in the back of the head,” Mr. Steele said.
Responding to Ms. Erdmann’s call, police officers from Bechtelsville, Douglass Township, other communities and the county, swarmed with helicopters and ambulances to the site of the shootings, about one hundred miles southwest of New York City.
Joseph Shay and the little boy were already dead in blood-spattered scenes in the house. Monica Shay was in very critical condition, and Paul Shay and Ms. Erdmann were reported as critically wounded, although both were said to be conscious when the police arrived and able to speak to investigators later.
As the victims were airlifted to nearby Pottstown Memorial Medical Center and Lehigh Valley Hospital, the authorities, who apparently learned the identity of the gunman from Paul Shay, began an extensive manhunt for Mr. Geisenheyner, first in the pastures and woods of Montgomery County, and then in a wider area of Eastern Pennsylvania.
Meantime, the assailant had fled south about forty miles to Trainer, Pennsylvania, a small Delaware County community just south of Philadelphia, and sought refuge Sunday night at the home of a friend he had known at a halfway house in Chester, Pennsylvania, about ten years ago.
Mr. Geisenheyner, whose criminal record dated back to the 1970s, had been jailed repeatedly. Since his release about a year ago, officials said, he had lived in various places and had repeatedly vowed revenge against Paul Shay. On Sunday, he told his friend that he had finally taken it. He also mentioned details of the Bechtelsville slayings that had not been made public, officials said. “He obviously indicated that he intended to seek revenge against the one victim,” said G. Michael Green, the Delaware County district attorney, referring to Paul Shay. “There’s no explanation that I’m aware of as to why he would have shot at and killed multiple victims, including a two-year-old child.”
In an interview, the friend, who requested anonymity for safety reasons, said the gunman fell asleep about 2 a.m. on Monday. Two hours later, with the gunman still asleep, the friend and a companion sneaked out of the house and called the police. About 5:30 a.m., a force of police officers, including five SWAT teams, surrounded the house, which is in a working-class neighborhood opposite an oil refinery near the Delaware River and a police station. Once the cordon of firepower was in place, the police made contact with the gunman by cellphone. But negotiations went nowhere. “He was determined not to surrender, not to end up in a prison again,” Mr. Green said.
Neighbors reported hearing shots in the morning, but it was unclear who was firing them. In the distant background, people in a neighborhood of houses festooned with American flags for the Fourth of July stood about, watching and wondering. “We’d been hearing pop, pop, pop all morning,” Chris Bartoliomeo, 38, a garbage truck driver who lives nearby, told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The standoff lasted about six hours. Then, about 11:30 a.m., the police stormed the house. The gunman fled into the basement, where he was killed, apparently in an exchange of gunfire with the police. None of the officers were hit, the authorities said. The man, pronounced dead by a medical examiner at 11:48 a.m., was armed with a .45-caliber pistol. He was believed to have discarded the .22 pistol from Saturday’s shootings, the police said. Asked if Mr. Geisenheyner had committed suicide, Erica Parham, a spokeswoman for the Delaware County prosecutor, said: “We believe it was not self-inflicted. We believe it is the result of police action.”
The particulars of the insurance dispute that apparently led to the bloodshed were under investigation, Mr. Steele, the Montgomery County assistant prosecutor, noted. But the matter apparently involved the Shays’ country home, a regular weekend retreat that had been in Ms. Shay’s family for years and had been bought from her mother, Ann Newbold, in 2003 for $200,000. It is a lovely property, set back in dense woodlands three hundred feet from the nearest road. Neighbors said the original house there had been destroyed in a fire, and the Shays replaced it with a large, three-story structure. Edward Newbold, 60, of Seattle, one of Ms. Shay’s two older brothers, was quoted by The Inquirer as saying that the unfinished house would take “a lifetime” to complete. He said he had been told there was “no hope; zero, zero, zero” that his sister would survive.
Mr. Steele said the insurance dispute was apparently unrelated to Mr. Shay’s business, A Real Good Plumber, in New York.
Paul and Monica Shay, who have lived at 263 East 10th Street for many years, are highly regarded in the East Village. He took part in battles that shaped the East Village over the past twenty years, neighbors said, and sided with squatters who took over abandoned city-owned buildings, helping to unclog drains and connect waste pipes to make them habitable, often at no charge. And when a homeless encampment was erected in Tompkins Square Park, the Shays encouraged park inhabitants to resist city efforts to dislodge them.
Mr. Shay, neighbors said, also employed men down on their luck, including his slain nephew Joseph, who had a criminal record in New Jersey dating to 1992, when he went to prison on a drug charge. More recently, correction records show, he served ten months in prison in New York on a grand larceny charge for passing more than $10,000 in false checks.
Since his release in 2009, Joseph Shay had lived at the Shays’ apartment, and had become a familiar figure in the neighborhood. Mr. Steele discounted reports that he might have been the assailant’s primary target. There were no indications that Mr. Geisenheyner even knew Joseph Shay, other officials said. Ms. Shay joined the Pratt faculty in 2000 and heads the arts and cultural management department at the school’s Manhattan campus.
Scott Trent, a public health worker in Greensboro, North Carolina, said he had known her for a decade in the October 22 Coalition, a national effort to curtail police brutality and assist its victims. “She’s a very rare kind of person,” he said. “The kind of person who is very serious and dedicated and committed to people.”