Back-to-Back Bursts of Gun Violence in El Paso and Dayton Shake a Bewildered Nation to its Core.

On Sunday, Americans woke up to news of a shooting rampage in an entertainment district in Dayton, Ohio, where a man wearing body armor shot and killed nine people, including his own sister. 27 others were wounded.  The assassin was shot to death by police during the shooting and his motive appeared unclear. Hours earlier, a 21-year-old with a rifle entered a Walmart in El Paso and killed 20 people.

In Bellbrook, a quiet suburb of Dayton, that residents described as a “utopia,” the typical Sunday morning peace was disrupted by the police and news media who swarmed the cul-de-sacs and sidewalks of the neighborhood where Connor Betts, the 24-year-old suspect, is believed to have lived. 

Theo Gainey, who lived for 10 years down the block from the Bettses and was a year ahead of Connor Betts in school, remembered him as a “bit of an outcast,” ostracized in large part because of threats he made at school that got him into serious trouble. Mr. Betts had to leave school for the rest of that year. When he returned, “the threat thing followed him, and people didn’t want to hang out with him.”

Some details about Betts began to emerge on Sunday: he attended local public schools in Bellbrook, took classes at Sinclair Community College in the Dayton area and was majoring in psychology. He had been working at a gas station and was registered to continue classes in the upcoming fall semester.

NY TIMES