Waffle House Shooting Suspect in Police Custody
Allegedly killed 4 at the restaurant on Sunday.
The Metro Nashville Police Department announced that authorities have Waffle House shooting suspect Travis Reinking in custody.
He allegedly killed four people at the restaurant, located southeast of downtown Nashville, on Sunday morning.
BREAKING: Murder suspect Travis Reinking is in custody. Arrested moments ago. pic.twitter.com/WwuDCXDCGQ
— Metro Nashville PD (@MNPDNashville) April 23, 2018
BREAKING: Travis Reinking apprehended moments ago in a wooded area near Old Hickory Blvd & Hobson Pk. pic.twitter.com/00ukga37s6
— Metro Nashville PD (@MNPDNashville) April 23, 2018
A citizen’s tip led the authorities to Reinking. They found him in the wooded area behind an apartment complex where he was last seen.
The Waffle House shooting suspect was arrested behind the apartment complex where he was last seen, CNN’s Nick Valencia reports. https://t.co/1sy845br66
— Meg Wagner (@megwagner) April 23, 2018
The police said Reinking possessed “a silver Kimber semi-automatic weapon with .45 caliber ammunition, flashlight and holster” along with a Colorado ID when they took him into custody. He refused to give them a statement and requested a lawyer. He went to a hospital to be checked out and will head to the Nashville jail after he’s discharged.
Authorities said they will book him “on four counts of criminal homicide” at the jail.
Reinking supposedly shot up the Waffle House at 3AM local time on Sunday morning, which resulted in the deaths of four people before a man disarmed him. He fled the scene and people last saw him wearing only black pants and no shirt.
160 law enforcement officials took place in the search for Reinking. They first surrounded the apartment they believed he lived in, but gave the all clear when it became clear he was not there.
He had previous entanglements with law enforcement. From The New York Times:
Mr. Reinking has had other encounters with law enforcement, including an arrest near the White House last July when he crossed a security barrier in pursuit of a meeting with President Trump.
Police reports show family members expressed concern for his welfare after he exhibited delusional behavior for an extended time, including expressing a belief that the entertainer Taylor Swift was stalking him and hacking his phone and Netflix account.
And after his arrest for the White House episode, Mr. Reinking, who lived in Morton, Ill., was forced to surrender three rifles and a handgun to officials in August, just months before he moved to Nashville.
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Comments
He ,looks like he has got the alcohol fetal syndrome thing going thin lips , ears pointy, could be
interesting.
I had to look it up:
Once he had to turn in guns, his name should have been on a national registry.
I wonder if he had guns he didn’t turn in or if he bought it or got it off the street.
Really hard to get someone admitted to Psych hospital these days and harder yet to keep them there.
Most patients stop taking their medication the day they leave the hospital.
Psych medication seems to be a common theme in shootings and mayhem in general.
Saw a report that the FBI gave the guns back to the LEOs, who gave them to the Father, who returned them to …
I’ve heard the authorities took his weapons and then GAVE THEM TO HIS FATHER.
Unbelievable, to trust Dad like that. Big mistake.
Sounds like he might have bipolar disorder, which in its victims, “turns on” when they hit their late teens…. Very, very tragic. Medicine still doesn’t know what causes it, how to effectively treat it. Tragic.
I was wondering if they were required to give the guns back, but instead of giving to him, they gave to the Dad hoping he would be more responsible. Dad may have been a bit afraid of him.
Unsure about the law on that.
I will say, his behavior definitely sounds like a serious psychiatric problem. Except him running away and hiding…. That suggests he knew it was wrong….
But the rest, his differing targets, his state of undress, victims being strangers to him…. suggests mental illness to me.
I was looking the issue up last night. Charges levied for the WH incident were given “deferred prosecution” and when he did some community service, the charges were dropped. Illinois has carry permits, not ownership permits. My initial outrage evaporated when I learned these details. Dropping the charges meant there was no legal justification for depriving him of his property, even if he wasn’t permitted to “carry” the guns around outside the home.
Sorry, but we don’t work “corruption of blood” in either direction in this country. Unless and until the father was convicted of a crime of his own, the problem wasn’t returning the guns.
The father SHOULD be facing charges as an accessory to murder now, though.
His plot to shoot up the White House was thwarted, so he shot up the Waffle House instead? The two are nothing like each other. He’s a quack for sure.
White House … Waffle House
Farmer Yasgur (National Lampoon ‘Woodstock’): “Long hair, short hair. What’s the difference once the head’s blowed off ?”
I thought the half-naked meme was shear genius.
A built-in insanity plea.
The problem in situations like this is actually several problems, none of which has to do with guns.
The first problem is that when people like this are arrested for doing crazy stuff rarely are they required to have an actual evaluation my a psychiatrist. Everybody does silly crap from time to time, but not even all crazy people are dangerous, but that decision needs to be made by a professional.
The second problem is the professionals. The heart of leftist thinking in medicine resides in the halls of psychatrity. I worked in psych for more than a decade in the 90’s and early 2000’s and I was there to see the change from actual treatment of mental illness to using mental illness as an excuse for poor behavior. It went from, “Yes, you did X because you are schitzo, but it is still your responsibility and it is your responsibility to take care of yourself and stay on your meds.” Now it is; “Yes, you did X, but it’s not your fault because you are mentally ill!”
The same is for those that are just evil instead of criminals being made responsible for their crimes it’s “society made you do it” or some kind of mythical oppression.
All of that is just symptoms of the main problems and that is the removal of personal responsibility.
If you want an extreme example of this problem look at the recent case in the UK where a guy raped and murdered a 15 year old girl and only got probation because he didn’t speak english well………what the hell does linguistics have to do with knowing right from wrong?
I don’t think psychiatrists or psychologists can predict violent behavior without markers that the rest of us would also recognize.
That said, in this case, they were there. He wanted to shoot up Trump or the White House….
Our mental health laws are catastrophic. Gerald Rivers, a/k/a Geraldo Rivera exposed bad conditions in mental homes and after that, the ball just went downhill.
Oh, I agree. I’ve worked in our “Mental Health system’ and it is abhorrent.
Somewhere Thomas Szasz is smiling…
The UK is lost
Typical onset for schizophrenia is age 18-22 or so, while this 28 year old killer has been exhibiting classic symptoms since at least 2014, per news reports, concerning his delusion that Taylor Swift was stalking him.
“Psych medication seems to be a common theme in shootings and mayhem in general.”
Mental problems tend to get treated with psych medication. Sometimes it doesn’t work. But you go with your theory.
Without opining on the specifics here, it does seem that our country needs a relatively humane way to separate people who have serious psychological problems and who are potentially violent from the rest of us. I don’t want the psych hospitals of old, but keeping people in the community who have demonstrated that they just can’t live in the community isn’t working.
Depends on the numbers. If the population of mentally disturbed is in the millions, then an occasional violent atrocity—a shootup at a Waffle House in Nashville, someone pushed onto subway tracks in NYC, deputies murdered in a Chinese restaurant in Gainsville—constitutes a vanishingly small percentage of the questionable population, and hardly puts isolation of the entire group at the top of the “to do” list.
As of November 8, 2016, there were at least 65,853,514 of them
There is NO way to prevent things such as this from happening. In the case of the mentally ill, they have to be identified before they commit the crime. This may not happen. This is especially true where violence is the result of chemical [drug] use. Also, there is no way for society to ban the possession of every dangerous substance or instrumentality in the world, by criminals, former criminals or the mentally ill. All anyone can do is to be prepared to meet a violent attack at the time it occurs.
The law abiding populous must be armed and willing to use those arms to protect themselves and the rest of society. Willingly disarming oneself is stupid. In the land of the blind, the man with one is king.
In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king.
Well said.
“Allegedly”? Are you serious? He was caught and disarmed in the act. He is the phucking shooter.
“Innocent until proven guilty.” So yes, “allegedly” is the correct word until/if he is convicted by either a Judge or a Jury of his peers. You do realize this is a LEGAL blog correct?