Shooter not alone in feeling isolated

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Before opening fire on an aerobics class, George Sodini wrote about feeling lonely and rejected — yet those very characteristics gave him the company of other mass killers whose isolation helped create a murderous cocktail.

Sodini’s deadly rampage at a suburban Pittsburgh health club shares threads with other massacres analyzed by psychiatrists and legal experts, who say the line between lonely and homicidal remains hard to place.

“These people get into a very self-centered, sometimes self- aggrandizing, often psychotic path that enables them, in their mind, to finally get the attention they crave,” New York attorney Carolyn Wolf, whose firm specializes in mental-health issues, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Thursday.

The 48-year-old Sodini fatally shot himself after killing three women and wounding nine others attending a weekly Latin dance aerobics class in Collier Township on Tuesday night. He wore black workout gear and fumbled around in a duffel bag before producing three guns, firing indiscriminately after shutting off the lights.

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.

About 75 people turned out in downtown Pittsburgh for a vigil Thursday night to remember the victims, offering prayers, lighting candles and observing a moment of silence. Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl was among those who attended.

Funerals are planned for Saturday for Gannon and Overmier and Wednesday for Billingsley.

Police say Sodini didn’t know his victims. His scathing, 4,000-plus-word blog reads like a months-long diary lamenting his wrongful rejection by “30 million” American women and alluding to his plans.

When Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, then committed suicide, his “message” was a video tirade to NBC railing about being overlooked by “snobs” and rich “brats.”

When Jiverly Wong killed 13 people and himself at a Binghamton, N.Y., immigration center in April, it was uncovered that unemployment, perceived police persecution, mockery for poor English skills and a dose of psychosis led him to kill.

Though their grievances, lifestyles and mental states varied widely — Cho and Wong had documented mental problems, but, so far, there’s no indication Sodini did — Wolf said their choice to kill others, and not just themselves, shows they had one thing in common.

“They’re thinking, ‘I want everyone to understand and appreciate why I’m doing this,’ and the way to do that, in their mind, is to kill other people and not just themselves,” Wolf said. “In their mind it sends a broader message.”

Many mass murderers feel rejected by a “pseudo community” — a group that may exist only in their minds, that has rejected them, said Dr. James Knoll, a forensic psychiatrist at the State University of New York’s Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. He spoke Thursday at a conference he organized to analyze the actions of Wong and Cho.