A disgruntled resident charged with killing three people at a Pennsylvania municipal meeting because of a feud over his junk-strewn property had given plenty of warning that he intended to kill people, his father said Wednesday.
Rockne Newell told his father and others that he planned to kill officials in rural Ross Township, saying he had nothing left to lose because he’d already been forced off the land, said Pete Newell, the man’s father.
“He said, ‘My life’s over, Dad. I just got to stop them from doing it to anyone else, and I’m going to take care of it so they’re not around to do it to anybody else,’” Pete Newell, 78, said in a phone interview.
The father said that when he told his son “it wasn’t worth killing someone over,” Rockne replied, “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.”
Rockne Newell, 59, was being held without bail after the shootings at the township meeting Monday night in this rural community in the Poconos that has a population of under 6,000.
Police say Newell shot one supervisor, who survived. The three dead were identified as James V. LaGuardia, 64, and Gerard Kozic, 53, both of Saylorsburg, and the township zoning officer, David Fleetwood, 62, who died at St. Luke’s Hospital-Fountain Hill about an hour after the shooting.
Kozic’s wife, Linda, was wounded in a leg and taken to Lehigh Valley Hospital. Also injured were Frank Piraino, 61, who was treated for a head injury, and Howard Beers, 55, a township supervisor, who went to the hospital with a hand injury.
Newell was stopped by two men at the meeting who tackled him and held him to the ground, police said.
“They are heroes,” said Lt. Col. George Bivens of the state police. “They wrestled with him even as he was firing rounds from his revolver.”
Newell had fired close to 30 rifle rounds through the walls and windows of the Ross Township municipal building around 7:30 p.m., police said, striking several people and sending others diving for cover before he went back to his car — packed with more firearms and ammunition — to retrieve a handgun.
When Bernie Kozen, director of the town’s parks department, looked out the window and saw Newell on his way back to the building with the second gun, he shouted out to warn the others in the room, Bivens said.
Kozen then tackled Newell as he entered. As shots were fired, a meeting attendee, Mark Krashe, came to Kozen’s aid, Bivens said, “undoubtedly” saving the lives of others in the room.
As Kozen tackled Newell, he said, the man was yelling, “You took my property,” adding an expletive, according to documents filed in the case in Monroe County.
Police said Newell was shot in the scuffle with the men, and was treated for the wound and jailed. It was unclear how that shooting occurred.
Newell had lost his property last month in a court fight with the township over longstanding complaints that he lived in a storage shed, built an illegal culvert and used a bucket outside as a toilet. The sale was finalized July 25, and stemmed from an $8,000 civil judgment the township won against Newell in 2002 over his failure to pay taxes.
“Normally, he wouldn’t harm anybody. But they just drove him nuts. They took the only thing he had in his life away from him,” his father said.
When deputies tried to serve Rockne Newell with documents informing him the property would be sold at a sheriff’s sale, Pete Newell said he warned them that his son had been making threats, saying: “I’m telling you one thing, people are going to die over this.”
Sheriff Todd Martin said his deputies took the threat to be against the sheriff’s department itself, not against others.
The suspected gunman faces a preliminary hearing Aug. 19. He has not entered a plea.
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