[The body count turns out to be 7. Looks like another tough case for the Theodicy Squad.]
March 13, 2005 Gunman Kills 7 in Wisconsin Church Group By DANIEL I. DORFMAN and JODI WILGOREN
BROOKFIELD, Wis., March 12 - An evangelical church meeting turned chaotic and tragic on Saturday afternoon, when a 44-year-old man brandishing a handgun killed seven people, and then himself, at a suburban Milwaukee hotel, the authorities said.
Chief Daniel Tushaus of the Brookfield Police Department said the gunman was affiliated with the Living Church of God, which has met on Saturday mornings at the 389-room Sheraton hotel for four or five years. The chief said the victims, whom he also would not name, were two teenage boys, a 72-year-old man and three men and a woman ages 44 to 58.
"I am asking myself why am I still alive," Chandra Frazier, who was in the room when the gunfire began, told reporters outside the hotel. "I dove under a chair. The man whose chair I dove under died."
Ms. Frazier, 21, said the gunman stopped to reload at one point and then resumed shooting. "There was one gentleman that told him to please stop and think about it," she said, adding, "The people who died were very nice people."
Though the police did not publicly identify the killer, several squads of detectives, along with agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, swarmed the New Berlin, Wis., home where a church member, Terry Ratzmann, lived with his mother and sister, and several local television and radio stations here reported it was he. Neighbors said Mr. Ratzmann, 44, was a computer programmer and prolific gardener who mostly kept to himself but dressed in a tie, jacket and dress pants every Saturday for church.
"He's a normal Joe, you know, he's the guy that you'd never suspect to have done this," said Shane Colwell, who lives across the alley from the Ratzmanns. "I don't want his mother thinking that she's raised a lunatic that she should have known was going to do this."
Mr. Colwell said that Mr. Ratzmann had built a garage, a greenhouse and a filtration system that collected rainwater for fish tanks where he raised trout and that he took his Toyota pickup truck on camping trips to "listen to the coyotes under the moonlight," but did not hunt.
"He said he never even shot a thing in his life," Mr. Colwell said. "The guy caught bunny rabbits in a humane trap and drove 20 miles to release them, because he didn't want to kill them." ...
Carl