He was bankrupt by age 24, when, court filings show, his only worldly possessions were $250 worth of clothing and $600 in a checking account. Debt collectors hounded him for years.
In the last two years, he landed a job as a driver for a beer distributor. He lived with a longtime girlfriend in a bumpy relationship that ended, at least temporarily, in the spring. On Facebook, he wrote of his interest in exercise supplements and guns.
None of this adds up to explain why Omar S. Thornton, 34, walked into Hartford Distributors, where he worked, in Manchester, Conn., on Tuesday morning and opened fire, killing eight people and taking his own life; the facts that first trickle in after a catastrophic crime rarely do.
But as the hours passed, the police and the public sifted through the particulars of Mr. Thornton’s life for any clues about what had prompted the deadly rampage.
The story that emerged on Tuesday began in East Hartford, a working-class town across the Connecticut River from Hartford, where Mr. Thornton grew up, the youngest of three siblings. “He was the baby,” said his aunt, Rosetta Billie.
Ms. Billie recalled that Mr. Thornton, as a child, trailed her around at her Pentecostal church every Sunday. “He was a good kid,” she said. “He never had been in trouble a day in his life. He never had been to the jailhouse a day in his life.”
Mr. Thornton graduated in 1996 from East Hartford High School, where he left little impression on several classmates contacted Tuesday. He continued his education, although it is not clear where; public records show that he owed $2,500 in student loans.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/nyregion/04gunman.html
I had little more than that at that age, but worked for the US Navy.
How long before Obama chimes in about how those crackers had it coming?