COULD HAVE BEEN STOPPED

Odessa Shooter Was Investigated for Planning Attack in 2011—and Let Go

The mother of Seth Ator, who killed seven and injured 25 in West Texas last month, called police eight years ago to report her son’s threats.

The mother of West Texas mass shooter Seth Ator, who killed seven people and injured 25 in a rampage from his car last month before he was killed, called police to her home in Amarillo in 2011 to report her son. CNN obtained new information about Ator through a records request that show how the killer’s mother was concerned that her son had stopped taking his psychopharmaceuticals and had become delusional. He spoke of a government plot against him and about dying in shootout with police. A police report from 2011 states that Ator was likely “planning an attack” and had hidden a machete in his bed and dug an underground bunker in the backyard of the family home, but that the activity was not enough to arrest him. Police were so concerned they logged the floor plan of the house and alerted a local SWAT team in the event of a standoff one day. “It’s clear that the shooter had mental problems, but we have something called the Constitution, and that prohibits us from just locking people up,”Amarillo Police Department Chief Ed Drain told CNN. “Broad criteria like these threats are not enough to bring criminal charges.”