Fear returns with awareness killer still at large

The relief that accompanied last week's arrest in the mysterious shooting of three people along the Illinois-Indiana border is gone, and the wanted posters are going back up.

Beecher's 4,000 residents, who breathed easier after the arrest last week of a police officer, have found themselves once again looking suspiciously on strangers and keeping their eyes out for the 1990s Chevy pickup truck the shooter reportedly drove.

A composite sketch of the gunman that was taken off the front door of the village's municipal hall is going back up, Beecher administrator Bob Barber said Thursday. People are being careful about locking their doors at night, he said.

"We were running around with the wrong assumption all that time," he said.

As the realization sank in that the gunman remains at large and could strike again, the manhunt kicked back into high gear in the border area, which is scattered with small villages and separated by miles of undulating farm fields.

Patrols have been beefed up in an around Beecher, said its chief of police, Jeffrey Weissgerber. He ordered his officers to stop sitting at stop lights to catch misdemeanor traffic violations and focus on the hunt instead.

The gunman, who reportedly asked about honeybees before opening fire in one case, has been described as heavyset and unkempt.

"We are looking at every truck and every face behind the wheel of that truck," said Weissgerber. The heightened alert, he added, has meant he has had to also take his turn patrolling the village in a squad car, which he usually doesn't do.

Residents, too, are scrutinizing cars and unfamiliar faces, and more are locking their doors at night, Barber said.

The shooting spree began around 10:30 a.m. on Oct. 5 at construction site a few miles from Beecher. The assailant shot and killed Rolando Alonso, 45, of Hammond, Ind., and wounded another worker, Joshua Garza, 19, of Dyer, Ind.

A worker who had returned to the work site Thursday brought protection in the form of a menacing-looking pit bull, which he tied to a car bumper.

"He'll give you a bark that'll scare your pants off," said Paul Todd, of nearby Cedar Lake, Ind., wearing a hat with the name of his power-washing company, Mr. Clean.

Todd was working the day of the shooting, but left about an hour before the gunman got there. One worker escaped into a plowed cornfield behind the ranch house that's undergoing renovations at the site. He helped an artist draw the composite sketch.

Speaking as he continued working, spraying dust off wooden planks, Todd described his friend Rolando Alonso as "a sweetheart, a good family man, a hard worker."

That someone would drive out to this secluded area, past idyllic red barns, pumpkin patches and horse stables, to attack people for no apparent reason was incomprehensible, said Todd.

"If it was a shooting in a jealous rage or a robbery, it might make some sense," said Todd. "But it was a maniac."

Later on Oct. 5, farmer Keith Dahl, 64, was wounded near Lowell, Ind.

That the shooter might be mentally unbalanced has left some believing he's likely to strike again.

"It's difficult for people like this to stop killing," said Kathleen Zellner, a Chicago attorney who has been involved in dozens of criminal cases. "It's usually a compulsion and they can't stop."

More worrying in this case, she said, is that the shooter may be emboldened by the false accusations against the police officer, Brian Dorian, who was cleared after detectives verified that he'd been home logged onto his computer on the morning of the attacks — and thus couldn't have played a part in them.

Dorian's arrest may have demonstrated to the gunman that authorities have no good eyewitnesses and no solid physical evidence, such a fingerprints or DNA samples, Zellner said.

"He may think he's successfully getting away with it," she said. "That could encourage him to try again."

Some Beecher residents, such as library director Jill Grosso, say they don't think the attacker will strike again, at least not in their village.

Grosso said she was among those who breathed a sigh of relief after Dorian's arrest. But she said she refuses to get as frightened again.

"I just don't want to feel scared all the time," she said, pausing from processing books Thursday afternoon. "I just keep telling myself that, 'The shooter — he's long gone."