Police have identified the assailant in the Wednesday attack during a screening of “Mad Max: Fury Road” in Antioch, Tenn., as a 29-year-old homeless man with a history of psychological issues.
Vincente David Montano, stormed the Hickory 8 movie theater with an ax, pepper spray and airsoft pistol that resembled a real gun before being shot and killed by a SWAT team member.
In a press conference late Wednesday evening, Nashville police spokesman Don Aaron said that Montano had “significant psychiatric or psychological issues” and had been committed for mental health care at least four times between 2004 and 2007.
Aaron said that Montano was identified when a fingerprint matched that of a man arrested on an assault charge in 2004.
According to authorities in nearby Murfreesboro, Tenn. cited by Nashville’s ABC station WKRN, Montano’s mother reported him missing on Aug. 3 and said he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 2006. She listed his address as “homeless” and said she had not seen him since May of this year.
Movie theater active shooter suspect identified as Vincente David Montano, age 29 pic.twitter.com/jn6iRpL9Pa
— Metro Nashville PD (@MNPDNashville) August 6, 2015
Montano allegedly entered the Carmike Hickory 8 Cinemas outside Nashville for the 1:15 p.m. screening of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Wearing a surgical mask, he is said to have unleashed a thick cloud of pepper spray in the theater with about eight other moviegoers.
He wounded one 58-year-old man, who sustained a superficial injury to the shoulder, possibly from the ax. Two other moviegoers, women aged 17 and 53, were treated for exposure to pepper spray. None were transported to a hospital.
Authorities arriving on the scene confronted Montano inside the theater, firing shots at him before he fled through a back door outside, where he ultimately died.
He was discovered with two backpacks, one of which contained what Nashville Police chief Steve Anderson called a “hoax device” that was not capable of exploding, while the other backpack contained nothing dangerous.
The Antioch incident is the latest in a series of violent attacks at U.S. movie theaters in recent years, including a deadly assault on a Lafayette, Louisiana, theater during a screening of “Trainwreck” on July 23. Two people were killed in that incident before the gunman, 59-year-old John Russell Houser, took his own life.