The lunch-hour crowd had just begun to subside at the McDonald’s restaurant on Kenosha’s southwest side when a man dressed in fatigues burst in a side door yelling, “I want everyone out of here.”
But before anyone could flee, the man opened fire with a handgun, fatally wounding one man, critically wounding a woman and grazing the wrist of a teenager.
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The gunman then turned the .44 Magnum to his head and took his life, police said.
A police officer said that a day before the apparently random rampage, the 26-year-old gunman had made a rambling, 40-minute statement on a videotape in which he said the world “screwed with him for a long time and now it’s payback time.”
The videotape was discovered in the man’s locked car shortly after the shooting.
Police said that on the tape he talked about several mass murders, including the unsolved January slaughter of seven people in a Palatine fast-food restaurant. But police discounted the possibility that he might be connected to that case.
Police identified him only as a man who lived at 3104 60th St. in Kenosha. Neighbors and friends identified the home’s resident as Dion Terres, who had moved to Kenosha last spring and who had lived in Arlington Heights.
Hours after the shooting, Kenosha police Capt. Robert Young said police knew of no apparent motive for the rampage.
About 1:30 p.m. Tuesday at the restaurant at 7530 Pershing Rd., Rosie Christman was finishing lunch with her husband, two sisters and a brother-in-law when she heard the gunman’s scream and the shots ringing out.
“It was terrible. I knew it was a gunshot. I could hear the man yelling. He was saying something like, `Get out of my way,’ ” said Christman, 58, a bridal consultant at a nearby shop.
“I could see people running,” she said. “Then I heard the second shot and saw more people running and screaming. There was nothing to jump behind or any place to shield yourself.
“I was trying to run for my life. My husband, Ralph, kept screaming, `Run! run!’ “
Inside the restaurant, two boys dived under a table, cowering at the carnage before them. And as Christman and her family rushed to escape, the gunman’s voice echoed in her ears.
“The thing that scared me the most was his voice,” she said in an interview hours later. “He sounded really angry. I think that voice scared me worse than anything else. Yeah, it was his voice.”
In a few seconds of terror, the gunman shot an 18-year-old man who walked in a side door, hit a 42-year-old woman in the back and fatally wounded a 50-year-old man before turning the handgun on himself.
The 18-year-old ran across the parking lot toward a nearby grocery store, trying to staunch the blood pouring from his wrist.
Lewis Aceto was walking across the parking lot when he saw the wounded youth run past.
“It was wild out there. I mean, things where happening so fast,” Aceto said. “This kid came running out holding his arm. I saw him go to the counter in Kohl’s (supermarket). He was talking to this girl, asking her to call 911. It blew me away. It was crazy.”
Minutes later, the frantic scene at the fast-food restaurant became more cacophonous amid the screams of police and fire sirens.
Kenosha Fire Department Capt. Michael Witkauskis was one of the first emergency workers on the scene.
“A woman was lying face up beneath one of the tables, with police attending to her,” Witkauskis said. “She was conscious but appeared to be in shock.” At a nearby side entrance lay the motionless bodies of the two men, Witkauskis said.
“About a foot from the one man, who I assume was the shooter, lay a large-caliber handgun. There was a pool of blood under him about the size of a desk,” Witkauskis said.
Paramedics rushed the wounded woman, Sandy Kenaga, 42, to Kenosha Medical Center, where she was fighting for her life following surgery Tuesday. The 18-year-old, whom authorities declined to identify, was treated and released at St. Catherine’s Hospital, Kenosha. The name of the slain 50-year-old man was being withheld late Tuesday, pending notification of his family.
Shortly after the shooting, Kimberly Sinkler, 16, said she used to date Terres, a man she described as a racist who several days ago threatened to shoot a Jehovah’s Witness who had come to Terres’ home. Sinkler said Terres was despondent over their breakup eight days ago.
As Sinkler and her friend, Karen Ross, 16, stood outside Terres’ home a few miles from the shooting, they described him as a disturbed man.
He was a loner who was obsessed with weapons and war-related video games, Ross said.
At times, she said, he shut himself in a second-story room that was painted red and adorned with Russian flags, a black chair and satanic posters on the walls. At other times, she said, he turned off the lights, lit candles and smoked marijuana.
Even more strange, she continued, were two recent events.
A few days ago, she said, Terres flew into a rage when a Jehovah’s Witness came to the door and identified himself. She said Terres threatened to blow the man’s head off before racing upstairs, donning Army fatigues and grabbing a Russian flag and a gun.
But by the time Terres raced downstairs, the Jehovah’s Witness had fled.
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“Good for him he was gone,” Ross said.
Also a few days ago, Sinkler said, Terres phoned her and may have given her an inkling of his plans.
“He said, `I’m going to miss you.’ He said, `Like yeah, I’m going to leave,’ ” Sinkler said.
In searching the gunman’s locked car after the shooting, police found a clip for an AR-15 assault rifle that was outside the car. Inside, they found a clip with 30 bullets in it and a camcorder with a videotape in it.
That 40-minute tape contained a statement the gunman apparently had recorded Monday, according to Kenosha police Lt. Steve Pataska.
That tape also hinted at Tuesday’s events, police said.
“He makes reference to the world having screwed with him for a long time, and now it’s payback time,” Pataska said.
In the tape, Pataska said, there are references to mass murderers Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer, among others.
Pataska described the gunman as a psychotic who was once treated for mental illness at a Barrington facility.
And in the tape, he alluded to January’s massacre in Palatine, where seven employees of a Brown’s Chicken & Pasta restaurant were gunned down. Their bodies were found in two of the restaurant’s coolers. No one has been charged in those shootings.
Palatine Deputy Police Chief Walt Gasior said Tuesday his investigators were following the Kenosha shooting to determine whether it might relate to the January shootings.
But Pataska discounted any link.
“My personal opinion is there is no link,” Pataska said.
Pataska said the tape shows a man talking “very intelligently at times, (but moments later) he would make references to digging up Abraham Lincoln and putting him in his bathtub.”
A former student at Hersey High School in Arlington Heights, Terres had worked at the Motorola Corp. plant near Libertyville for two years before he quit in March, a company spokesman said. The spokesman said Terres was not forced to quit.