English news
Health-club gunman felt rage against all women
Diary posts show he plotted shootings for many months
By Michael Rubinkam
ASSOCIATED PRESS
2:00 a.m. August 6, 2009
BRIDGEVILLE, Pa. – George Sodini seethed with anger and frustration toward women. He couldn't understand why they ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He hadn't had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn't slept with a woman in 19 years.
“Women just don't like me. There are 30 million desirable women in the US (my estimate) and I cannot find one. Not one of them finds me attractive,” the 48-year-old computer programmer lamented in a chilling diary he posted on the Internet.
For months, he also wrote vaguely about using guns to carry out his “exit plan” at his health club, where lots of young women worked out.
On Tuesday, Sodini put his plan into action.
He went to the sprawling L.A. Fitness Club in this Pittsburgh suburb, turned out the lights on a dance-aerobics class filled with women, and opened fire with three guns, letting loose with a fusillade of at least 36 bullets.
He killed three women and wounded nine others before committing suicide.
“He just had a lot of hatred in him and (was) hell-bent on committing this act, and no one was going to stop him,” Allegheny County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said yesterday.
The 4,610-word Web diary appeared to be a nine-month chronology of his plans to end his misery with a shocking act of carnage at the health club. He portrayed himself as painfully and inexplicably lonely.
“Every evening I am alone, and then go to bed alone,” he wrote. “I see twenty something couples everywhere. I see a twenty something guy with a nice twentyish young women. I think those years slipped right by for me. Why should I continue another 20+ years alone?”
It was unclear when the Web diary was posted and whether it had been updated online repeatedly since November or posted in its entirety recently. Moffatt said investigators are trying to determine whether anyone saw it online before the rampage.
“If anyone knew of it, they would have a moral and ethical obligation and legal obligation to bring it forward,” the police superintendent said.
The violence rocked the town of about 5,300 people just outside Pittsburgh.
Killed were Heidi Overmier, 46, of Carnegie, a sales manager at an amusement park; Jody Billingsley, 37, of Mount Lebanon, who worked for a medical-supply company; and Elizabeth Gannon, 49, of Pittsburgh, an X-ray technician at Allegheny General Hospital.
Sodini was a member of the health club and had been there two times Tuesday before he came back at night, police said. He did not have a relationship with any of his victims, according to police.
In his Web diary, Sodini wrote of planning the attack since at least November and said he tried to carry it out when the same Tuesday-night aerobics class met Jan. 6. “I cannot wait for tomorrow!” he exulted the night before. But he backed out at the last moment.
“It is 8:45PM: I chickened out!” he wrote. “I brought the loaded guns, everything. Hell!”
In the Union-Tribune on Page A3
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