HATTIESBURG -- Investigators said Monday night they still were piecing together what motivated a man to open fire at a Hattiesburg restaurant on Monday afternoon, wounding five customers and employees. “We don’t have anything that we can release right now,” Hattiesburg Police Department spokesman Lt. Eric Proulx said.
Suspect Scott Tyner, 44, of Hattiesburg, was apprehended by Hattiesburg Police officers a short distance from the restaurant. Tyner lived nearby on South 21st Avenue.
The shooting came suddenly, seemingly without provocation, for the employees and patrons inside Cucos, a Mexican restaurant on a frontage road facing U.S. 49.
Proulx said the shooting happened a little before 3:30 p.m.
“There was no confrontation,” Proulx said. “There was no exchange of words.”
Emergency responders arrived on scene about 3:31 p.m. Five victims with blood-spattered clothes were rushed out on stretchers and taken to Forrest General Hospital. One victim, a middle-aged white male, appeared to be spitting up blood.
Tyner was booked in the Forrest County Jail on five counts of aggravated assault Monday night. Bond was not set.
Hattiesburg Police did not release any other information on Tyner, other than to say Tyner was not a current employee of the restaurant.
According to the Hattiesburg American archives, Tyner was a member of the Forrest County Democratic Executive Committee as late as 2006, an Iraq War protester and an avid letter writer on political topics.
But while Tyner called for the impeachment of President George W. Bush and decried tax policies that favored the rich, he also opposed amnesty policies for illegal immigrants. One letter he wrote in 2010 questioned the reasoning behind celebrating Cinco de Mayo because of the large number of illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States.
“Mexico doesn’t care for its people; it exports them,” he wrote.
Onlookers at the crime scene expressed shock at the violence that seemed to come out of the blue.
Brian Foxworth was among about a dozen folks who stood pressed against the police tape in the Payless Rent to Own store parking next door to Cucos.
Foxworth, the Payless store manager, said he didn’t hear the shots, but hurried out of his store as soon as he heard the emergency responders arrive.
While he said he’s seen police come to Cucos twice before in his five years at Payless, he said he never expected to see the business next door crawling with police and ambulances. “I don’t know what to say about it,” he said. “I’m just stunned by the whole situation.”
AP PHOTO/HATTIESBURG AMERICAN, RYAN MOORE Hattiesburg Crime Scene Investigator Jeff Byrd, left, and Sgt. Junior Burnett speak at the Cucos Mexican Restaurant on Monday in Hattiesburg, where a mass shooting occurred. Police arrested a man and charged him with aggravated assault in the shooting of five people.
Another source said
- Scott Tyner was a Democratic Executive Committee as late as 2006, an Iraq War protester and an avid letter writer on political topics - usually with a decided leftist spin.
For more info, read post #40 and below on an earlier Free Republic thread..