WHEELING, W.Va.
(AP) - A prosecutor says a former police officer waved people out of harm's way
before peppering a federal courthouse in West Virginia with gunfire.
U.S. Attorney Bill
Ihlenfeld says Thomas J. Piccard fired from a parking lot across
from the Wheeling Federal Building Wednesday.
Authorities have
said the 55-year-old resident of Bridgeport, Ohio, got off up to two dozen
shots in the small West Virginia panhandle city before law enforcement officers
shot him to death.
Residents in the
neighborhood around Piccard's trailer home in Bridgeport, a few miles west of
Wheeling, say Piccard disclosed in the past few days that he had stomach
cancer. Mahlon Shields says a neighbor told him Piccard wanted to go to Florida
to die.