Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  She had a gun! She had a clear shot, a place to steady her aim, and he was less than six paces from her. She’d dropped smaller targets much farther away. She couldn’t miss.

  “WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE!”

  I’ve got him! she thought.

  Suzanna reached for her purse lying a couple feet away in the warm goo of her uneaten chicken tetrazzini—but then realized to her horror, even before she lifted it from the congealing mess, that her Smith & Wesson wasn’t in there. It was safely under her passenger seat a hundred feet away, and a lunatic killer stood between them.

  “Wait till those fucking women in Belton see this!” Hennard hollered as he shot into a group of school teachers. “I wonder if they’ll think it was worth it!”

  IN THE BLOODY AFTERMATH OF GEORGE HENNARD’S RAMPAGE INSIDE LUBY’S CAFETERIA, A PHONE RANG ENDLESSLY AND MUZAK PLAYED SOFTLY OVER THE CARNAGE.

  Texas Department of Public Safety

  There was no time for regret. Suzanna began to consider her other alternatives, all bad. She thought of breaking the window and running but knew it would only call attention in her direction. She thought of stabbing the gunman with a steak knife, throwing a saltshaker at his head, whacking him with her goopy purse while he inserted a fresh clip at the next table.

  “The women of Belton and Killeen are vipers,” Hennard shouted as he pumped three bullets into the chest of Kitty Davis, a new grandmother who’d come to celebrate a former coworker’s engagement.

  Hennard prowled the floor, cool and deliberate, executing crouching patrons point-blank in the head or chest, pausing only to rack new clips into his guns. Witnesses later said he often passed over men to shoot women.

  The entire restaurant was eerily silent, except for the pop-pop-pop of Hennard’s guns and his profane ranting. Frightened diners hid the best they could, sometimes protected by nothing more than their hands covering their heads, hoping not to attract the killer’s attention. Paralyzed by fear. Waiting quietly to die.

  “I have to do something,” Al Gratia told his daughter as they hid behind their overturned table. “If I don’t, he’ll kill everyone in the restaurant!”

  “Yeah, and he’ll kill you, too, you son of a bitch!” she screamed as she clung for dear life to her father’s golf shirt. She kept waiting for a cop to take the killer down. A seventy-one-year-old man shouldn’t be the one. Where were the cops? There were always cops in here!

  Al had been a crew chief for a U.S. Army Air Corps bomber squadron in World War II, but he was no John Wayne. He didn’t own guns and didn’t fish because he couldn’t inflict pain on the fish. He taught his children how to shoot with a BB gun, but after Suzanna’s brother killed a mourning dove, nobody picked up the gun ever again.

  Al just couldn’t sit and watch people die, one by one, at the hands of a lone madman. And he knew his wife and daughter would die, too, if he didn’t act.

  In a split second, Hennard turned away and Al leaped out of his daughter’s grasp. He’d taken only a few steps when Hennard turned back and shot him once in the chest. Al dropped onto his side in the narrow aisle and groaned. He was alive but mortally wounded—and Suzanna knew it.

  Instead of coming for Suzanna and her mother, Hennard turned to his right and picked up the systematic slaughter in the front area of the cafeteria. Later, she would realize that her father’s body probably blocked Hennard’s path to them, and with so many other targets, it wasn’t worth the trouble of Hennard making his way to them.

  Hennard moved back to the serving area, where many people tried to hide.

  “You trying to hide from me, bitch?” he yelled at a woman huddled in a corner just before he killed her.

  He emptied his Ruger into several more people with a cool affect. When he used up all his preloaded Ruger clips, he just set the useless gun on a plate of fried chicken and hush puppies and continued to kill with his Glock.

  Returning to the center of the dining room to investigate a mysterious heavy thud, Hennard cornered Olgica Taylor and her daughter Anica McNeil, who clutched her four-year-old daughter Lakeichha.

  “Tell people I ain’t killing no babies today!” Hennard shouted. “Tell everyone Bell County was bad.”

  He stepped aside to let Anica and her child flee, and when the young mother wavered, he yelled again, “Get out of here before I kill you both!”

  Then he shot Olgica in the face before making another pass through the dining room, killing others as he circled.

  In the chaos, people tried desperately to hide. One woman hid in a walk-in freezer and was later treated for hypothermia. A teenage food preparer curled inside an industrial dishwasher and didn’t come out until the next day. Some got away, but most were frozen by their fear, trapped like rats in a box.

  Suddenly, another explosion of glass rattled the restaurant, this time from the back. Suzanna feared it might be a second attack by an accomplice, but it wasn’t. A 6-foot-6, 300-pound (about-2-meter, 136-kilogram) mechanic named Tommy Vaughan, a Luby’s regular, had thrown his linebacker body through one of the immense windows at the rear of the dining room, and panicked diners now frantically scrambled behind him through the jagged glass.

  “Mom, we have to get out of here!” Suzanna yelled, but Suzy had just watched her husband of nearly fifty years gunned down. She was frozen by fear, slumped against the window. Suzanna stood and turned her back to the gunman, fully expecting to feel the thump of a bullet as she lifted her mother to her knees. She knew she’d only feel the impact at first. The burning pain would come later.

  “You’ve got to follow me, Mom!” she commanded as she sprinted toward the open window, stumbling over someone and losing a shoe as she fell headlong into a bramble of glass shards outside. Blood streamed from cuts on her hands and arms as she ran, with one bloody, bare foot, across the asphalt toward Mark Kopenhaffe, who’d just emerged from an emergency exit.

  “My father’s shot in the chest …he’s down …,” she told her friend as she looked around expecting to see her mother right behind her. “My God, where’s my mom? I thought she was right behind me!”

  Suzy hadn’t followed.

  Suzanna tried to go back, but police had finally arrived on the scene and a cop kept her outside. Her mother wasn’t with the others who’d escaped, and the restaurant’s reflective glass hid the carnage inside. The shooting continued as she limped to the relative safety of a nearby apartment complex with other survivors.

  There, a tenant loaned Suzanna a phone so she could call her sister in Killeen.

  “Get over to Luby’s now. There’s been shooting. Mom and Dad are in trouble” is all she said.

  She tried to call her brother in Lampasas, too, but only got his answering machine. In the background of her message were gunshots. Hennard was shooting the straggling diners who had been wounded or hesitated to escape when they had the chance.

  GOING DOWN WITH A FIGHT

  When the first cops arrived, they couldn’t be sure who the shooter was. One rattled survivor told them it was a black man carrying an assault rifle. And if they saw a man with a gun inside, they couldn’t be certain if it was the killer, a vigilante civilian defending himself, or another undercover cop.

  But any doubt was erased when State Police Sergeant Bill Cooper, standing outside the shattered window where it all began eleven minutes before, watched a dark-haired white man in a blue, short-sleeved shirt firing at wounded people on the floor and then executing an old woman next to the windows on the far side of the dining room. It was Suzy Gratia.

  “Police!” one of the cops yelled, but Hennard ignored them.

  WHEN HIS RUGER P89 RAN OUT OF BULLETS DURING HIS DEADLY 1991 ASSAULT, INSANE KILLER GEORGE HENNARD LAID IT ON A PLATE OF FOOD AT THE LUBY’S CAFETERIA IN KILLEEN, TEXAS.

  Texas Department of Public Safety

  A Killeen undercover detective, Ken Olson, was one of the first lawmen on the scene. When Hennard showed himself, Olson fired his Browning 9 mm from his hip. His bullet passed throu
gh the killer’s right forearm and lodged below the skin in his chest. Stunned, Hennard retreated to a confined alcove outside the restrooms. He was cornered.

  But he wasn’t going down without a fight. He fired more shots and taunted the cops, who shot back.

  “Drop your weapon and come out with your hands up!” Olson’s partner Chuck Longwell hollered.

  “Fuck you!” Hennard yelled.

  “Fuck us? Fuck you!”

  “Fuck you! I’m going to kill more people,” Hennard taunted again.

  A handful of cops slowly closed in on Hennard’s hiding place, crawling over dead and wounded bodies as they tightened the noose. This guy wasn’t getting out alive unless he surrendered, and that didn’t look likely.

  After trading a few more shots, Hennard was hit in his left thigh, throwing him against the alcove’s back wall. Although he now suffered from at least four flesh wounds, the undaunted Hennard unleashed another fusillade.

  “I have hostages!” the killer yelled.

  The cops could clearly see he didn’t. The skirmish continued.

  “You don’t have any fucking hostages,” Olson said.

  “I do, too!”

  “Show ’em!”

  Then Hennard spied a cop crawling belly-down through a breach in the ruined dining room. An easy kill. He raised the Glock for a clear shot and—nothing. His gun jammed. A live shell stuck awkwardly out of the breech. In all the chaos, Hennard had mistakenly shoved a Ruger clip into the gun. He dropped to his stomach, hastily cleared the breech and substituted a full Glock magazine he found on the floor, then racked the slide.

  It was too late to kill the cop, who now had the drop on him. But it wasn’t too late to make things right.

  Hennard rolled onto his back, pressed the Glock against his right temple and pulled the trigger. The bullet exited his left temple and hit the alcove wall, releasing a spew of blood, fragments of brains, and whatever demons haunted him.

  The numbers were horrifying. Twenty-two innocent people—eight men and fifteen women—lay dead around Hennard, and another woman died of her wounds later. Seventeen were wounded by gunfire, and sixteen more suffered cuts, broken bones, and shock. More than one hundred rounds had been fired in little more than twelve minutes.

  One small town wondered why.

  And George “Jo Jo” Hennard, who died with his frightening eyes open and lay in a congealing puddle of his own gore, had fired the last shot in the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

  The world had missed every sign, every omen.

  MONSTROUS MOVIE

  Al Gratia outlived his killer.

  When the shooting ended, paramedic Robert Kelley found Al alive but in shock, rolling from side to side, unable to speak or breathe. His pulse was weak, and he was turning a deathly blue as he slipped toward unconsciousness. At a glance, Kelley knew Al was mortally wounded, likely drowning in his own blood. Because other lives might be saved in these precious minutes, Kelley made a harsh triage decision. He mentally labeled Al as a likely death.

  THE HORROR OF THE LUBY’S MASSACRE PROPELLED SUZANNA GRATIA HUPP (SHOWN HERE WITH HER FAMILY AFTER SHE TOOK OFFICE) INTO THE TEXAS LEGISLATURE, WHERE SHE CHAMPIONED LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS’ RIGHTS TO CARRY CONCEALED WEAPONS. HER CRUSADE REVERBERATED THROUGH MANY STATES AND ALL THE WAY TO CONGRESS.

  Courtesy of the Hupp Family

  “Let’s get this guy out front, on oxygen,” Kelley told an EMT with a stretcher as he continued the grim task of sorting the dead from the living. Muzak still played and a phone rang incessantly somewhere as the Vietnam combat vet circled the wrecked room. Gun smoke and the smell of death hung in the air as he covered each corpse’s face with a green linen napkin, a sign to his fellow medics that this one was beyond help.

  When he was almost finished, Kelley checked another lifeless man’s pulse.

  “Is he dead?” asked the police officer standing over him with an assault rifle.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a good thing,” the cop said, and that’s when Kelley knew the dead man was the killer himself.

  Suzy Gratia refused to save herself

  because it would require leaving

  her beloved husband Al behind.

  As Kelley hurried to help with the wounded outside, Suzanna tried in vain to get back into the restaurant to find her mother and father. Refused reentry at the broken window where she’d escaped, she looked for her lost shoe and limped around to the front of the building, where ambulances were shuttling the wounded to local hospitals, along with a steady stream of med-evac dustoffs from Fort Hood. She pushed her way through a growing throng of reporters, frenzied survivors, overwhelmed first responders, and curious onlookers.

  There under the Luby’s atrium, out of the direct sun, she found her father’s body strapped to a backboard. He had just died. His open eyes were empty and flat, and blood pooled on the asphalt beneath his stretcher. She cursed herself for being slow getting there, for the cuts that slowed her, for worrying about a goddamned shoe. She might have been able to spend her father’s dying seconds with him.

  “Is there anything I can do?” she asked Kelley, who covered Al’s body with a sheet.

  “He’s gone,” the veteran paramedic answered.

  Suzanna’s sister and brother-in-law, Erika and John Boylan, suddenly burst through the crowded chaos.

  “Dad’s gone,” Suzanna told her as Erika dissolved into tears.

  “What about Mom?” Erika asked when she regained her composure.

  “I’ve got a bad feeling,” Suzanna said, close to breaking. “The way the guy was shooting …”

  The news about Suzy Gratia came later, when survivors were gathered in the neighboring Sheraton Hotel, when Suzanna’s friend Mark Kopenhaffe appeared at the door of her first-floor room.

  SUZANNA GRATIA HUPP TURNED HER GRIEF AND ANGER INTO ACTION BY BECOMING ONE OF THE NATION’S MOST VISIBLE ADVOCATES FOR INDIVIDUAL GUN RIGHTS.

  Ron Franscell

  “Thank God you’re okay!” she said, hugging him.

  “Suz, your mom’s dead,” he told her. “There’s nothing I could do.”

  “How do you know?”

  He told her how the cops had watched Hennard kill Suzy, how her death strangely might have saved lives. “Him shooting her …that’s how they knew he was the bad guy,” Mark said.

  Suzy and Al Gratia died as they had lived most of their adult lives: together.

  Suzanna didn’t sleep that night. The monstrous movie just kept replaying in her mind, and always with the same bloody ending. In her waking nightmare, her mother Suzy refused to save herself because it would require leaving her beloved Al behind. And every time the horror show looped back on itself, she died with him. No matter how hard she wished, Suzanna couldn’t change the ending in her imagination or in reality.

  And that night, sleep didn’t come easy for Robert Kelley, either. In a nightmare, he watched a giant hand materialize from an angry, black cloud, pointing down at him reproachfully. He bolted upright in a cold sweat, frightening his wife. He thought of the old man who reached out to him without words or breath, the man he decided would soon die. How could he have been sure? Was there more he could have done? Numbed by all the death around him, did he give up too quickly on Al Gratia?

  CORNERED AFTER FAILING TO KILL A POLICE OFFICER, GEORGE HENNARD ROLLED ON HIS BACK AND SHOT HIMSELF IN THE HEAD, PUTTING AN END TO HIS DEADLY RAMPAGE.

  Texas Department of Public Safety

  Two weeks after the shooting, Al and Suzy Gratia were buried together in the national cemetery in San Antonio to a bone-rattling 21-gun salute that curdled Suzanna’s blood. The acrid stink of gun smoke in the crisp fall air made her sick.

  Thankfully, a cadre of psychological counselors had recently been moved to nearby Fort Hood in anticipation of heavy Desert Storm casualties, so survivors and the families of victims received quick attention to their emotional trauma. (The first irony is that Killeen lost twice as many citizens to
the Luby’s killings than to the brief Gulf War; the second is that almost exactly nineteen years later, an Army psychological counselor named Nidal Malik Hasan would open fire with two handguns on soldiers just after lunch at Fort Hood, killing thirteen and wounding at least thirty in Killeen’s second major mass murder in two decades.)

  After Hennard’s ashes began their journey to the sea, Suzanna joined a small group of survivors on a clandestine tour of the killing floor.

  Locals had been gossiping that the cafeteria, like the McDonald’s in San Ysidro, might be torn down, erased from the community’s memory altogether. Instead, Luby’s had gutted the restaurant, ripped up the bloody carpeting and scrubbed the bloodstains off the concrete beneath, patched the bullet holes, expelled the stink of burned gunpowder and death, dumped all the furnishings …exorcised everything but the ghosts that haunted the place.

  But on the asphalt outside, in the exact spot under the atrium where her father breathed his last, a dark stain lingered.

  It was Al’s blood.

  A ONE-WOMAN CRUSADE

  The massacre was not yet finished for Suzanna. In her mind, amid the guilt and cold rationale that had failed her when it mattered most, the slaughter of her mother, father, and twenty-one others became part of a bigger battle for survival. If she could replay the day, she would risk everything by carrying her gun into Luby’s for a shot at George Hennard, but there were no replays.

  She began to think she could change the past by changing the future.

  The people of Killeen wore yellow ribbons while troops from nearby Fort Hood were fighting in Iraq and switched to white ribbons after Hennard’s rampage. They left flowers and heartfelt messages outside the empty Luby’s shattered windows.

  And Texas governor Ann Richards spoke passionately about the need to control the sale and possession of automatic weapons, even though Hennard had purchased his guns—both semiautomatic weapons—completely legally. “Dead people lying on the floor of Luby’s should be enough evidence we are not taking a rational posture,” she said.