BALTIMORE, Md. — The suspect emerged from the Light Street Animal Hospital with his hands in the air, and 24 hours later, police are still trying to determine why he shot his brother, a popular veterinarian in South Baltimore.
“The other day, they were talking about putting him out and the brother was kind of like worried about it, because he’s not all there, but he thought he was just shooting off at the mouth,” said David Peters, whose friend works at the business.
“So they were going to evict him?” we asked.
“They were going to evict him,” he responded.
The suspect shot his 66-year-old brother in the leg before running upstairs and holding officers at bay.
Police say the injury was so severe that’s it is not yet known whether the victim will lose that leg or whether it can be saved.
At mid-day, the shooting suspect had not yet been identified nor formally charged as he underwent a mental evaluation at MedStar Harbor Hospital.
While police have not shed light on other threats the suspect might have made on Monday, others had spotted him coming out of a hardware store the day before raising questions of their own.
“I saw him at Ace Hardware with these two seven-and-a-half-gallon gas tanks, and I asked him what he was doing with them, because I’ve talked to him before,” said Al Melaragno, whose granddaughter is an employee at the animal hospital. “He said he was going to get gas for some boats down at the harbor, which I thought was kind of odd. He told one of them on the phone, one of those employees, that he was going to blow up the building.”
Workers returned to the animal hospital on Tuesday to allow customers to come retrieve their pets, but they are not open for business.
As one woman put it, as she was seen leaving with her dog, “They don’t have a doctor right now.”
