PITTSBURGH (AP) -- A neurologist who befriended the man arrested in a shooting rampage that killed three immigrants, a Jewish woman and a black man said the shooting suspect often expressed paranoid ideas and sometimes believed he was being followed.
"Some of the things he said were just so outlandish," Dr. George Naruns of St. Petersburg, Fla., said Sunday about Richard Scott Baumhammers, 34.Police searching the home where Baumhammers lived also found a three-page manifesto indicating he was trying to form a political party opposed to immigration, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
The document, which included Baumhammers' signature as "chairman" of The Free Market Party, advocated the rights of European Americans and denounced Third World immigration, according to a prosecution source whom the newspaper didn't name.
Mike Manko, a spokesman for District Attorney Stephen Zappala Jr., said Sunday he had no comment on the Post-Gazette report.
Naruns befriended Baumhammers in an Internet chat group about the eastern European country of Latvia, where Baumhammers' parents were born. Naruns said Baumhammers would come across as normal in one conversation and express strange ideas in the next.
He also appeared to have personality problems, including a tendency to brag, that made people uneasy and may have interfered with his attempts to get a job and make friends, Naruns said. But the doctor said he never saw Baumhammers enraged.
"The sad thing is that he could have gotten some counseling or some help, he could have dealt with some of these minor issues before they turned into all of this," Naruns said.