Much of the twisted history of Louisiana theater shooter John Houser passed through Georgia, from once hanging a Nazi flag outside his LaGrange bar to drawing family violence complaints in Carroll County.
A drifter with a history of mental problems, Houser stirred trouble for neighbors, law enforcement, family members and local officials as he moved between Georgia, Alabama and eventually Louisiana.
Court documents and interviews form a portrait of an emotional pipe bomb who wrote racist and anti-government rants online long before he opened fire in a Lafayette, La., movie theater Thursday, killing two people and wounding nine others before killing himself.
“He had all these dreams — to become a lawyer, to become an elected official, to own his own club,” Bobby Peters, the former mayor of Columbus, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Many of his dreams failed as the years went on. “If you put it all together, you could see this coming.”
Thursday's shooting marked the third mass shooting in the South in little over a month. Whereas the Charleston, S.C., shooter, who killed nine African-American worshipers in a church, tried to start a race war, and the Chattanooga, Tenn. shooter is being investigated as a terrorist after killing five servicemen, it's unclear what motivated Houser.
But it was clear that he was a troubled man and those who knew him remember him as confrontational, unpredictable and potentially violent.
Houser, 59, established himself as a political rabble-rouser in Columbus during the 1980s and 1990s, regularly voicing hard-line opinions during City Council meetings and even running unsuccessfully for office, Peters told the AJC. He was known for his combative nature, but he was not disrespectful to public officials, he said.
“We knew him as Rusty. He came from a political family. His father had been the tax commissioner,” said Peters, now a Superior Court judge. “He was an intelligent young man. He would dig into issues. It was tough to change his mind.”
Even then, Houser had vehement conservative and anti-government beliefs, Peters said.
“He wanted to be seen as a watchdog over the government,” he said. “He always believed things were being done behind closed doors.”
Houser was a regular guest on a local TV talk show, and on his LinkedIn site he boasted that he, “Invited political controversy on every one of them, and loved every minute of it.”
Host Calvin Floyd told NBC News that Houser was “a very radical person with radical views.”
Former Columbus attorney John Swearingen told NBC News that Houser had once tried to burn down his Columbus, Georgia, law office in the 1980s.
“I represented somebody — maybe several people — he did not like, and he tried to hire someone to burn the law office,” Swearingen said. “The man was a police informer, and they got it on tape.”
A grand jury declined to indict Houser on the case, officials said.
Nazi flag in LaGrange
Houser received an accounting degree from Columbus State University in 1988.
By the year 2000, Houser was running a bar in LaGrange called Rusty’s Buckhead Pub, and police were cracking down on him for selling alcohol to minors. When the city revoked his operating license, he fought back hard.
“He felt his rights had been violated,” that the city had acted like Nazis, LaGrange Police Chief Louis Dekmar told the AJC.
Houser placed a Nazi flag about the size of a queen-sized bed sheet outside the bar and kept it there for about a month during the summer of 2001. Dekmar said Houser did not do it because he believed in the Nazi philosophy, but as a way to embarrass the city. A picture of the flag hanging outside the bar appeared on the front page of the local newspaper, he said.
“We deal with a lot of difficult people. But he was significantly difficult,” Dekmar said.
Houser’s troubles extended to his family.
In a 2008 court filing in Carroll County, his wife said she became so worried about his “volatile mental state,” that she removed “all guns and/or weapons from their marital residence.”
A protection order was at least temporarily granted.
Relatives said Houser became so upset over the prospect of his daughter’s marriage — he thought she was too young — that he “exhibited extreme erratic behavior and has made ominous as well as disturbing statements,” according to court documents.
The document said he had come to their home in Carroll County and “perpetrated various acts of family violence.”
Carrollton police had investigated a report of a “mentally disturbed person” after he arrived unannounced at his daughter’s office, and later threatened another family member, the New York Times reported.
Court documents from 2008 say family members petitioned the probate court to have him involuntarily committed “because he was a danger to himself and others.”
A judge issued the order, and Houser was taken to a hospital in Columbus.
Houser was treated in the Phenix City, Ala., area for an unspecified mental illness in 2008 and 2009, according to Heath D. Taylor, the sheriff of Russell County, Ala. Court records show that he filed for bankruptcy protection in 2002, and the superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, Col. Michael D. Edmonson, said his finances had been poor; he recently received money from his mother, the New York Times reported.
Houser’s wife, Kellie Maddox Houser, filed for divorce in Carroll County in March of 2015. They had been separated since 2012.
‘I didn’t trust him’
Houser eventually settled in Phenix City, Ala., a town just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus and about 110 miles southwest of Atlanta.
Neighbor Russ Lenig said he avoided Houser at all costs, believing he was unstable and potentially dangerous.
“I didn’t trust him,” Lenig said.
Houser’s home, a rental two doors down from Lenig, had a constant mess in the yard. Houser was often seen outside working on old cars, cursing out his frustrations. When a neighbor complained that the cursing upset his children, Houser didn’t seem to care and didn’t stop.
The neighbors directly next door put up a fence to separate themselves from him. When a neighbor repeatedly complained about Houser’s property to code enforcement, Houser confronted him, saying if he did it again, “we’re going to have an issue.”
When Houser was forced to move out last year, he damaged the house, new owner Beth Bone told Channel 2 Action News.
“He had put paint everywhere. There was goldfish, (he) cut them up and put them in different places in the whole house,” she said.
Neighbors said they were stunned that someone who lived so close to them was involved in a shooting spree.
“He could have just done it at our local theater,” Lenig said.
Lenig also said the pain of the shootings was made worse because it came on the heels of the shootings in Chattanooga and Charleston.
“I wonder what people are thinking,” he said.
Houser’s brother, Rem Houser, told CNN on Friday he saw his sibling just last month.
“He just needed some money to continue moving on, living, surviving, so we gave him some, and that was the last we heard of him. We hadn’t heard of him in probably 10 years prior to that, and hadn’t heard from him since,” Rem Houser said in Columbus.
“So he reached out to you to ask for money?” the interviewer asked.
“Yes,” Rem Houser said. “Reached out, and then closed the door immediately.”
About the Author
