John Salvi

Diagnoses

Personal

Passions

Vocation

Lifestyle

Notable

Traits

American homicide, a scripture-quoting religious fanatic Catholic who became the center of the national abortion debate. A 22-year-old student hairdresser, he cited a reverence for life that induced him to shoot up two abortion clinics. A strange and quiet loner with little direction but a hair-trigger temper, gay and a body-builder, he had once been fired from a maintenance job for dropping his pants to expose himself to a woman. On 12/30/1994, Brookline, MA, at 10:00 AM he went on a rampage, killing two and wounding five people at abortion clinics; one nurse had been shot nine times. He fled to Norfolk, VA, where he shot up another clinic before he was apprehended. He had no overt sign of mental problems but was detained for mental observations. After ten days his folks were allowed to visit, and when they left he went berserk. Salvi's dad was part owner of a dental lab and his mom was a former real estate agent. As a young teen, the indication that he needed help was obvious to virtually anyone who knew him - acquaintances, neighbors, even his own relatives. There were signs for years that he would indeed, one day explode. He was described as having "cold, dead eyes." An aspiring fire-fighter as a kid, he himself was a suspect in several suspicious blazes. In September 1994 he had moved to an apartment near the ocean in Hampton Beach, a summer-resort area largely shuttered for the winter. He kept his drapes constantly closed and drove a black Toyota pickup which he had plastered with a color photo of an aborted fetus. After the New Year, he became increasingly erratic. There were problems at the hair studio where he had been employed since the prior August. At the holiday party on 12/11/1994 he drunkenly and crudely propositioned a married coworker. Over the following days there were flare-ups with coworkers and customers, including a bizarre struggle with one client over the man's coat. Two days before Christmas, he stopped going to work. During his parent's Christmas visit, they argued about Salvi's inability to hold a job. During mass on Christmas Eve, he stunning the congregation by striding toward the altar and launching into an anti-Catholic tirade. A week later, he broke. He entered a clinic in Brookline, MA and calmly asked, "Is this Planned Parenthood?" When 25-year-old Shannon Lowney answered yes, he pulled a .22-caliber rifle from his duffel bag and fatally shot her in the neck, turned and wounded three other people in a random hail of bullets. Minutes later he entered another clinic two miles away and reprised his grisly task, this time killing receptionist Lee Ann Nichols, 38, and wounding two staffers. When he struck the third clinic two days later, he was apprehended. On 1/09/1995, he pleaded innocent in court. He was convicted, but his conviction was overturned in 2007, after he had been dead for over a decade. He committed suicide by suffocation in prison on 29 November 1996. Link to Wikipedia biography