Military Doctor's Nightmare Came True -- Gunman's First Victim Feared His Volatile Patients

Air Force psychiatrist Maj. Thomas Brigham had a dream - and a nightmare.

The dream, according to a friend, was that he would finish his military service in a year, let his hair grow longer and move his family to a cattle farm in Wisconsin.

The nightmare was that one of his volatile patients would seek revenge after he judged him or her unfit for military service, a chilling vision that seemingly fell into place in a deadly burst of gunfire at the Fairchild Air Force Base hospital near Spokane.

Brigham, 31, a native of Mobile, Ala., was the first of four people slain Monday by gunman Dean A. Mellberg, formerly of Lansing, Mich., before Mellberg was shot to death by a military police officer. Twenty-three other people were wounded in the bloody rampage that lasted five minutes. Yet, minutes before the rampage, by Marlene Anderson's recollection, there was little to indicate that the clean-cut young man who checked out of her motel Monday was on a homicidal mission.

Memories of Mellberg will always remind the manager at Arnold's Motel that it is what you do not see in people that can pose the greatest threat.

Mellberg was calm, even pleasant, Anderson said, when she upbraided him for being late in checking out.

"I fussed at him because he hadn't paid up and was still hanging around," Anderson recalled Tuesday. "But he was very polite, soft-spoken, nice, apologetic. He said, `OK, OK, I'm leaving.' "

Mellberg, carrying a large gym bag, then left for the base, 10 miles west of Spokane.

According to base and local law-enforcement officials who pieced together Mellberg's actions that fateful afternoon, the 20-year-old, dressed in black from his T-shirt to his sneakers, arrived at the base's hospital annex around 3 p.m.

Mellberg headed to Brigham's office, opened fire with a MAK-90 semiautomatic assault rifle equipped with a 75-round drum, and killed Brigham and Capt. Alan London, 40.

The two therapists, who shared an office, both had signed the recommendation that Mellberg be discharged for psychological reasons, Spokane County Undersheriff John Goldman said yesterday. Mellberg had been discharged in May.

Mellberg then turned and marched down the building's halls and corridors, randomly spraying bullets, cutting down anyone else who got in the way. He briefly entered the main hospital and shot up the cafeteria, where he killed 8-year-old Christine McCaren of Spokane. He then ran outside, firing as he went and fatally shooting Anita Linder, 62, from Spokane, as she tried to flee.

The spree ended when a military police officer who arrived on the scene on a bicycle shot and killed Mellberg as Mellberg chased a man around a car in a parking lot.

"It was sheer pandemonium," said Gordon Fagras, who owns a coffee cart in the hospital. "Between the shots, the screams, the sound of feet pounding and the sound of your own heart beating, you couldn't hear anything."

Eight of the wounded remained in critical condition yesterday, including Anthony Zucchetto, 4, and his sister Janessa, 5.

Among Mellberg's victims who survived the gunfire was 64-year-old Orson Lee, a combat veteran who came through tours of Korea and Vietnam without a scratch.

From his hospital bed, Lee recounted how Mellberg aimed his assault rifle at him as the Boise resident walked toward the hospital for follow-up treatment after cataract surgery last year. The bullet struck a tree instead. Lee was hit by fragments.

"When you start hearing rounds going off . . . there's no fear because you're thinking, `They ain't going to get me,' " Lee said. "I've been pretty lucky all my life."

The Fairchild mass shooting underscores the need for a ban on assault weapons, Gov. Mike Lowry, Sen. Patty Murray and other gun-control advocates said yesterday.

A national-gun-lobby spokesman, however, accused the gun-control forces of capitalizing on a tragedy to push a political agenda. The criminal, not the weapon, must be the focus of Congress and the Legislature, said Alan Gottlieb of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

"This is a terrible tragedy," Lowry said. "The first thought goes out to all the victims involved, but we also need to have laws that do what they can to prevent that type of weapon being available. . . ."

"There is no reason at all that we in our society should have weapons that can shoot so many bullets in such a short period of time. Their only purpose is to kill a large number of people."

Information from the Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press is included in this report.