He went from house to house in the village at dawn, cold-bloodedly gunning down his mother, his son, a 2-year-old cousin and 10 other neighbors. Terrified residents said if a police patrol car hadn’t shown up, they all would have been dead.
Police said they knew of no motive yet in the carnage Tuesday that left six men, six women and a child dead in the Serbian village 30 miles southeast of Belgrade.
After the rampage, police said suspect Ljubisa Bogdanovic, a 60-year-old who saw action in one of the bloodiest sieges of the Balkan wars, turned his gun on himself and his wife as authorities closed in. Both were in grave condition at a hospital in the Serbian capital.
In the small lush village surrounded by fruit trees, the suspect’s 62-year-old brother Radmilo broke down in tears, unable to explain why the massacre happened.
“Why did he do it? … I still can’t believe it,” he said sobbing, covering his face with his hands. “He was a model of honesty.”
“As a child, he was a frightened little boy. I used to defend him from other children. He couldn’t even slaughter a chicken,” he said.
But he said his brother had changed after serving in the army during a brutal Serb-led offensive against the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar in 1992 — the worst bloodshed during Croatia’s 1991-95 war for independence.
“The war had burdened him,” Radmilo said in an interview. “He used to tell me: God forbid you live through what I went through … Something must have clicked in his head for him to do this.”
Twelve people in the village were killed immediately between 5 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. and one person died later in a Belgrade hospital, Serbian police chief Milorad Veljovic said.
“Most of the victims were shot while they were asleep,” Veljovic told reporters. “The most harrowing scene discovered by police was the dead bodies of a young mother and her 2-year-old son.”
Although such mass shootings are relatively rare in Serbia, weapons are readily available, mostly from the 1990s wars in the Balkans. Media reports said the suspect had a license for the handgun and police said he had lost his job last year at a wood-processing factory.
Serbian Prime Minister Ivica Dacic said the killings showed that the government must pay more attention to gun control and other social problems facing the Balkan nation, which is still reeling from the 1990s wars. His government held an emergency session and proclaimed Wednesday a national day of mourning.
Residents said Bogdanovic first killed his son and his mother before leaving his house and then began shooting his neighbors. They expressed deep shock, describing the suspect as a quiet, helpful man.
“He knocked on the doors and as they were opened he just fired a shot,” said villager Radovan Radosavljevic. “He was a good neighbor and anyone would open their doors to him. I don’t know what happened.”
“I never saw him angry, ever,” said Milovan Kostadinovic, another resident. “He was helping everybody, he had a car and drove us everywhere.”
Still, neighbors said an entire five-member family was shot dead in one house, including the small boy who was the suspected killer’s cousin.
Kostadinovic said the suspect was confronted by police while en route to his house.
“If they didn’t stop him, he would have wiped us all out,” Kostadinovic said, standing in front of his two-story, red tile- roofed house. “He shot himself when police stopped him.”
His wife Stanica said their small white-and-brown dog Rocky had gotten very nervous early in the morning and was barking and jumping up and down. She said when her husband opened their door, a policewoman shouted: “Get back in!”
“He was shooting everybody. Police saved us,” she said.
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