Illinois: One Lunatic, Three Guns

Killing sprees have become grimly commonplace in the U.S., but last Friday’s horror in Winnetka, Ill., was particularly searing because the victims were schoolchildren. It began when Lori Dann, 30, shot and wounded an eight-year- old boy in the bathroom of the Hubbard Woods Elementary School. Dropping one pistol, she entered a second-grade classroom, where she opened fire with another revolver, killing one youngster and critically wounding four others. Dann fled to a nearby household, where she shot one occupant and barricaded herself in the building alone. When a police SWAT team finally burst in about seven hours later, Dann was found dead. She had shot herself through the head with her third gun, a .32-cal. revolver.

A native of nearby Glencoe, Dann was suspected by authorities in a 1986 ice- % pick attack on her estranged husband, although she was never charged. The FBI wanted to question her about making threatening telephone calls, and in March she had been picked up in Madison, Wis., for shoplifting. On Friday morning Dann delivered poisoned food to several homes and college fraternities. She then set fire to a house where she had worked as a baby- sitter, temporarily trapping her former employer and two children in the basement (they escaped by smashing a window). Dann drove six blocks to the school; she may have been searching for her employer’s other two children, who were away on field trips. Left behind in the bloody school bathroom after the rampage was Dann’s .357 Magnum, for which she had a permit. Asked Winnetka Police Chief Herbert Timm: “How did a woman with that kind of background get licensed to carry a gun?”