Shared from the 9/3/2019 Houston Chronicle eEdition

Odessa shooter a loner neighbors call ‘El Loco’

Often anti-social, he once argued with neighbor while brandishing rifle

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Photos by Jerry Lara / Staff photographer

Veronica Alonzo is a neighbor to Seth Ator, who killed seven and injured 22 in a shooting rampage Saturday. She says she and her husband would refer to Ator as “El Loco” because of his odd behavior and anti-social tendencies.

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Neighbors say Seth Ator would use the upstairs windows of his aluminum shack to shoot animals on his property.

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Jerry Lara /Staff photographer

Veronica Alonzo says that although her children were able to easily retrieve shoes that Seth Ator’s canine companion would collect, Ator came to her home with a rifle to complain about trash.

ODESSA — Veronica Alonzo was shopping with her family Saturday at the Sam’s Club near Texas 191 when they heard gunshots outside.

Moments later, when she saw on Facebook that a roaming gunman was driving a small gold sedan, she and her husband joked about it.

“He said it could have been ‘El Loco,’ ” said Alonzo, 29, referring to Seth Ator, their strange, anti-social neighbor.

When the family returned to their mobile home west of Odessa, they noticed Ator’s car was not parked as usual outside his crude brown metal dwelling.

“We had a barbecue. We were waiting for him to arrive, like he always did, but no, the police arrived,” she recalled Monday at her home. “By then I was having a panic attack. I had heard it was him, but I didn’t know he was already dead. The police calmed me down.”

Ator, 36, was killed in a shootout with police Saturday afternoon after authorities said he killed seven people and wounded 23 with an assault-style rifle during a car chase that covered 15 miles between the sister cities of Midland and Odessa. The rampage ended in Odessa behind a crowded movie theater.

Authorities offered new details Monday about Ator’s mental state and actions that day. He showed up for work Saturday at Journey Oilfield Services, where he was a truck driver, “in a very distressed mental state ... enraged,” FBI special agent Christopher Combs said. Ator was fired, and both he and his employer called 911, Combs said. Police responded, but Ator was gone by the time they arrived.

Ator then called the FBI’s national tip line, something Combs said he had done hundreds of times before. He said Ator rambled disjointedly but did not make a threat.

About 15 minutes later, Ator was pulled over by two Texas Department of Public Safety troopers for failing to signal a lane change. He opened fired at the officers through the rear window of his car, injuring one of them. He then sped off, shooting randomly at drivers and passersby.

Combs said Ator “was on a long spiral of going down.” He said that despite Ator’s odd behavior, authorities had no basis to intervene earlier.

“Thousands of people call law enforcement every day with crazy ramblings,” Combs said. “The bar is when somebody makes threatening comments.”

Ator lived in a metal shack that lacked electricity, plumbing, a floor and even furniture, on a piece of property he apparently owned on the far west side of Ector County.

For electricity, he sometimes relied on generators. On cold nights, his neighbors said, he would sleep in his car with the motor running.

His home is about 20 miles from downtown Odessa, on an unmarked caliche road off Kermit Highway, amid nodding pump jacks and property covered with sage, mesquite and huisache trees. Crime scene tape still surrounded Ator’s property Monday.

This is where many oilfield workers live in the booming Permian Basin oil fields. It is the graceless side of the energy economy: a cluttered zone of mobile homes, oil tanks, service trucks, salvage yards and endless commercial metal buildings.

Known to his closest neighbors as “El Loco,” the crazy one, Ator kept to himself.

The nickname was partly a joke and partly an expression of community unease.

“He had no communication with anyone. It was the way he acted. I thought, ‘this person is not well,’ ” said a neighbor who declined to be identified. “While he seemed to me to have an emotional problem, I never could have imagined him doing something like this.”

Ator did not exchange greetings, did not have visitors at his house and spent a lot of time shooting his black rifle from a second-floor window into the field below. Neighbors sometimes heard loud rock music.

His only known friend was a small tan dog that he cared for with obvious affection. One of his last acts before the rampage was to come home and feed the dog.

“When we first moved in seven months ago, he struck us as something new, but we got used to him,” said Salet Holguin, 24, who lives nearby. “He wasn’t friendly. My husband told me that if he ever came over here, to not open the door.”

Alonzo, a mother of six, said the small dog would regularly carry her children’s shoes back to Ator’s house, and her children would retrieve them without problems.

She felt threatened, though, on one occasion when Ator paid her an angry visit armed with his black rifle. Ator said had the tan dog had been rolling in soiled disposable diapers at the nearby garbage container.

“He said, ‘I’m tired of you all throwing the Pampers on the ground,’ ” Alonzo recalled.

Alonzo told him she did not use Pampers, but he was not appeased.

“He scared me when he came over with that rifle and all the children were around,” she said.

She called the sheriff’s office, but they could not find the location and did not arrive.

Alonzo, who moved into the white mobile home about a year ago, recalled her landlord making an off-hand remark about Ator.

“The owner told me that when he first moved in, he had a wife and kids,” she said.

The neighbors said Ator apparently didn’t hold jobs for very long, because the company name on the trucks he drove changed regularly.

They also said he no longer resembled the healthy, grinning man depicted in a 2001 police mug shot, from when he was arrested in Waco on charges of criminal trespass and evading arrest. He later failed a firearms background check and was prevented from purchasing a gun. It was unclear how he obtained the rifle he used Saturday.

“He had longer hair, he was thin, and he had teardrop tattoos on his face,” said Cesar Garcia, 29, who lives nearby.

Bryan Holguin, 25, the man who warned his wife to be wary, said Ator’s violent, destructive end was not a complete surprise.

“It’s sad that he’s dead, but it also might be a relief, because I thought eventually that’s how he might end up,” he said.

“I had that feeling. He always seemed so sad, with problems on his face.”

Emily Foxhall contributed to this report.

JMacCormack@express-news.net

“He scared me when he came over with that rifle and all the children were around.”
Veronica Alonzo, a neighbor of the shooter’s, describes an interaction with him

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