Travis Reinking once told law enforcement officers that the singer Taylor Swift had been harassing and stalking him — a delusion that authorities in Illinois said Reinking had had for years.
In 2017, the year before Reinking became the subject of an intensive police manhunt after a deadly shooting at a Tennessee Waffle House, officials said he went to a local pool wearing a pink dress and swam in his underwear while coaxing life guards to fight him. Soon after, he traveled to D.C., and tried to cross a security barrier near the White House, declaring himself a “sovereign citizen” who wanted to speak with President Trump.
Police reports dating to May 2016 offer a glimpse of what officials described as Reinking’s “mental problems.” The reports also reveal that, despite Reinking’s history, he was in possession of several firearms and a gun license in Illinois. His license was revoked and his firearms were confiscated after the incident at the White House last summer, but officials said the weapons later landed back in Reinking’s hands.
Early Sunday, police say the 29-year-old man from Morton, Ill., used a previously confiscated semiautomatic AR-15 rifle in a shooting rampage at a Waffle House in the Nashville area.
Four people were killed in the shooting, and the frantic search for Reinking continued Monday as schools in the Nashville area were placed in “lockout” mode.
The Metro Nashville Police Department said Monday morning that “there have been no credible sightings” of the suspected gunman after an overnight search by local, state and federal law enforcement officers. Reinking, police said, was last seen Sunday morning in a wooded area behind his apartment, where he had been living for several months.
One other weapon that had been previously confiscated, a pistol, remains unaccounted for.
Authorities say Reinking, wearing nothing but a green jacket, opened fire at the Waffle House restaurant in Antioch, a neighborhood southeast of downtown Nashville, just before 3:30 a.m. Sunday. He had been sitting in his pickup truck at the Waffle House for a few minutes, looking around, before he got out and immediately began shooting at customers in the parking lot, Metropolitan Nashville Police Department spokesman Don Aaron said.
The man kept shooting as he walked inside, shattering the restaurant’s glass windows. At one point, he stopped, presumably to reload. That’s when police say a customer, James Shaw Jr., lunged at the gunman, wrestled the weapon away from him and tossed it over the counter.
[James Shaw Jr. on why he rushed the Waffle House shooter: ‘He was going to have to work to kill me’]
Among the victims was 29-year-old Taurean C. Sanderlin of Goodlettsville, Tenn., a restaurant employee who was fatally shot while standing outside. The others killed were customers: Joe R. Perez, 20, of Nashville; Deebony Groves, 21, of Gallatin, Tenn.; and Akilah Dasilva, 23, of Antioch.
Two others — Shanita Waggoner, 21, of Nashville, and Sharita Henderson, 24, of Antioch — were hospitalized at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, police said. They were in stable condition Monday, hospital spokeswoman Jennifer Wetzel said.
It was not immediately clear how or why Reinking obtained a Firearm Owner’s Identification Card in Illinois, or whether he had been diagnosed with any mental illness before he moved to Tennessee. Illinois state law prohibits someone who’s been “adjudicated as a mental defective” or has been a patient at a mental institution from obtaining a firearm license.
But documents released by the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office in Illinois paint a picture of what they described as a troubled — and armed — man who had talked about killing himself.
Late at night on May 26, 2016, an emergency response officer found Reinking at a CVS parking lot in Morton, where his family lives. Reinking believed that pop star Taylor Swift had been hacking his phone and that his family was involved in the harassment.
According to a police report, he told a bizarre story about a Dairy Queen meetup with Swift that ended with Reinking looking for the singer on the restaurant’s rooftop. The police report says Reinking was eventually taken to a hospital to be evaluated.
On June 16, 2017, officials say Reinking — who was living inside a shop above the offices of his father’s construction business in Tremont, Ill. — screamed at two employees before driving away wearing a pink dress and carrying an AR-15 rifle. He showed up minutes later at a local pool, jumped into the water wearing only his underwear and exposed himself to the lifeguards, a police report says.
Reinking’s father and sister both told officials that they would try to keep the weapons away from Reinking until he got some psychological help, the report says.
[Mass shooting statistics: The terrible numbers that grow with each mass shooting]
A month later, he was arrested in Washington for trying to cross a security barrier near the White House.
A D.C. police report says Reinking told authorities he had to get to the building to speak with the president, and that “he was a sovereign citizen and has a right to inspect the grounds.” Sovereign citizens are viewed by the FBI as anti-government extremists who believe they are not subject to governmental laws, and law enforcement officials have described them as a major concern.
An officer told Reinking to move because he was blocking a pedestrian entrance at the White House, but Reinking “began to take his tie off and balled it into a fist” while walking past the security barriers and toward an officer, the police report says.
“Do what you need to do,” Reinking said, according to the report. “Arrest me if you have to.”
Reinking was charged with unlawful entry, a misdemeanor, officials said. He later entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. attorney’s office.
He was ordered to perform 32 hours of community service at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Morton and to stay away from the White House for four months. He mowed grass, ran a forklift to move pallets of food, and packaged food for distribution to local food banks as well as hygiene packets for hurricane disaster relief. A letter signed by the church’s pastor, the Rev. Steven. E. Hauter, says Reinking completed 33.5 hours of community service.
A woman who answered the phone at the church Monday said Hauter, was “not available and we have no comments.”
Prosecutors dismissed the case against Reinking in November after he completed the terms of the agreement.
After an investigation by the FBI office in Springfield, Ill., state and local officials confiscated Reinking’s guns and revoked his firearm license in August. The weapons were given to Reinking’s father, who agreed to keep them secure and away from Reinking, officials said. But the father later acknowledged giving the weapons back to his son, who had moved to Tennessee.
Under Illinois law, certain confiscated guns can be released to a family member, but Reinking could not lawfully possess the weapons in that state. It’s unclear whether possessing the weapons was illegal in Tennessee.
A woman who answered Sunday at a number registered to Reinking’s relatives in Illinois said, “We have no comment.”
Police said Reinking moved to the Nashville area last fall and worked in the construction industry. Aaron, the police spokesman, said he was fired from a job about three weeks ago and was later hired by another employer. Reinking had not been to work since Monday.
The Waffle House shooting rattled the working-class neighborhood in Antioch, where a masked gunman opened fire at a church last year, killing a woman and wounding several other people. Emanuel K. Samson, 26, was arrested in that shooting.
It also comes at a time of intensified debate over guns and a swirling controversy about the AR-15, a type of weapon used in several mass shootings recently and dubbed “America’s rifle” by the National Rifle Association.
“It makes me nervous, him not caught yet,” Erin Steward, a cashier at an Exxon gas station in Antioch, said Monday. “I’m being more cautious of my surroundings. It makes you kind of on edge.”
Beer delivery driver Ethan Loxley said that attitude has become commonplace along his Antioch delivery route — a departure from the “nice, laid-back” community he knew before the separate shootings rocked two mainstays of local culture: middle-of-the-night dining at Waffle House and Sunday morning worship at a church.
Brandon Gee from Antioch and Devlin Barrett, Mark Berman and Keith L. Alexander in Washington contributed to this report.
Read more:
Masked gunman rampages through Nashville church; usher uses personal weapon to subdue shooter
He fired a shotgun into a classroom door, police say, then said ‘sorry’ to the injured student
More than 208,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine
The last time they met face to face, at the United Nations in September, French President Emmanuel Macron was puzzled when President Trump and his delegation seemed to have no agenda, carried no papers and took no notes.
“It was like a good discussion with a buddy in a bar,” recalled a French official. “At the end, you don’t know exactly what it means.” Now that Trump has been in office longer, the official mused, “maybe the process is different.”
At the very least, the agenda will be clear to both sides when Macron arrives here Monday for the first official state visit Trump has hosted for any leader. Following their joint attack, with Britain, on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons facilities early this month, there is a Syria strategy to figure out. Trade, climate change, Russia, North Korea and counterterrorism are all on the to-do list.
But no issue looms larger than Iran, and the nuclear agreement that the United States and five other countries signed with Tehran in 2015. Trump has called it a bad deal and said the United States will withdraw unless it is “fixed.” Signatories France, Britain and Germany vehemently disagree, say there can be no changes to the agreement, and have pledged they will not follow Trump’s lead.
The U.S. decision deadline is May 12. Failure to work out a compromise between the United States and its closest European allies that will keep the nuclear accord alive could lead to the most significant trans-Atlantic breach in decades.
[Iran nuclear deal: What you need to know]
Enter Macron. By consensus among his counterparts in Europe, if there is accommodation to be reached with Trump on Iran, he is the man to close the deal.
Senior French, British and German officials have been negotiating for months with a State Department team led by Brian Hook, director of policy planning, to come up with a way to meet Trump’s demands without altering the deal itself or driving the other signatories — Russia, China and, of course, Iran — to cry foul.
According to U.S. and European officials involved in those talks, significant progress has been made on addressing concerns about the deal’s sunset clauses, its verification rules, and the absence of restrictions on Iranian ballistic missile testing and development, as well as new measures to counter Iran’s “malign” activities in Syria and beyond in the Middle East. Four documents have been drafted that they believe are responsive to Trump’s criticisms.
An overall declaration and three sub-texts are to outline their joint understanding that other international conventions will prohibit Iran from developing nuclear weapons beyond restrictions that expire in the next decade, push the International Atomic Energy Agency to expand its monitoring and promise strict sanctions if Iran moves forward with intercontinental ballistic missile development.
Mike Pompeo, Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, was a harsh critic of the deal when it was signed and spoke openly about bombing Iran’s nuclear installations. But at his confirmation hearing last week, Pompeo assured lawmakers that “there is no doubt that this administration’s policy, and my view, is that the solution to preventing Iran from getting nuclear weapons, to finding ourselves in the same place we are in North Korea in Iran, is through diplomacy.” He also agreed with the Europeans and the IAEA that Iran has so far complied with its terms.
“I am confident that the issue will be discussed at great length” during Trump’s upcoming meetings with European leaders, including a one-day visit here by German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, following Macron’s departure late Wednesday, Pompeo said. “It’s important to them and I know they’ll raise their hopes and concerns.”
In an interview broadcast on “Fox News Sunday,” Macron acknowledged that the nuclear deal was not perfect.
“But what do you have for a better option?” he asked. “I don’t see it.”
Neither Macron nor the White House expect a final decision by Trump during the French president’s visit, officials from both countries said. For their part, the Europeans worry that the mercurial U.S. president, who railed against the deal during his presidential campaign and ever since, will ultimately decide to trash it even if his State Department recommends otherwise.
But Macron has been working toward this moment for months. “What I told him was not to tear up the deal,” he told journalists in October.
[Macron seems to crack the Trump code]
“It’s a very long shot, but it’s the only one we have,” François Heisbourg, a former French presidential adviser on defense and national security, said of the Macron offensive. “You might as well try.”
The special bond that seems to have developed between the 71-year-old American president and Macron, a 40-year-old political novice elected just a year ago, is no accident. While Merkel is clearly turned off by Trump, and British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Parliament and population have indicated they don’t even want him to visit, Macron has gone far out of his way to cultivate him.
Their first handshake, a virtual arm-wrestle at an international meeting in Germany in June, produced a globally viral video. “He is a specialist,” Macron said on Fox, referring to Trump’s apparent attempt at establishing physical dominance by forcibly yanking Macron’s hand toward his own body. “Seeing [Japanese] Prime Minister Abe and some of the different victims, I resisted.” It was, he said, laughing, a “friendly moment. Don’t worry.”
In July, Macron invited Trump to Bastille Day in Paris, treated him as a senior statesman and impressed him with a front-row seat at a massive military parade that Trump now plans to emulate in Washington this fall. In addition to the September U.N. meeting, the two have near-weekly telephone conversations.
“It’s Macron’s nature,” said William Drozdiak, author of “Fractured Continent: Europe’s Crises and the Fate of the West” and an upcoming biography of the French president. “He walks into a room, sees a chair and tries to seduce it.”
“He looks at Trump and says, ‘Okay, we’ve got our interests, and the best way of securing them is for me to flatter this guy, pat him on the back and get along with him so that I can manipulate him,’” Drozdiak said. Macron is “the ultimate pragmatist . . . that’s why he’s the only Western leader now with an open dialogue to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” as well as Trump.
The French turn down their noses at media descriptions of a “bromance” between the French and U.S. presidents. “Macron is not the friend of Trump,” said the French official, speaking on condition of anonymity to candidly discuss the relationship. “We don’t believe all this stuff about bromance, that they’re buddies.”
“Macron is doing this because he knows that he has to be close to our closest ally, the president of the most powerful country in the world. It’s in our interest to have a good relationship. He doesn’t go as a friend,” the official said.
The length and depth of the U.S.-French relationship will be spotlighted during the visit, an extravaganza of activities clearly designed to match Trump’s reception in Paris last summer. After his midday Monday arrival, Macron and his wife will travel by helicopter with the Trumps to Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home about 15 miles south of Washington, for dinner, weather permitting, on the broad terrace overlooking the Potomac River.
“President Trump is eager to host” the Macrons at Mount Vernon, “as he remembers fondly the dinner [Macron] hosted at the Eiffel Tower on the eve of Bastille Day” for Trump and the first lady, said a senior administration official who briefed reporters Friday on the visit, on White House-imposed condition of anonymity.
On Tuesday morning, Trump and Macron will hold a one-on-one meeting, followed by expanded talks with their delegations. U.S. officials will include Vice President Pence, the secretaries of State, Treasury, Defense and Commerce, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, Trump national security adviser John Bolton and economic adviser Larry Kudlow.
Macron will attend a State Department lunch hosted by Pence and a state dinner at the White House on Tuesday.
He will address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday morning, the anniversary of a 1960 address there by former French president Charles de Gaulle. In the afternoon, after a visit to Arlington National Cemetery, he will hold a town hall meeting with students at George Washington University, followed by a solo news conference before his departure.
On Syria, the two leaders will try to develop a joint response to kick in if Assad persists in using chemical weapons. Trump is expected to press Macron — as he has other allies and partners — to increase the French contribution to Syrian stabilization, while the French leader is seeking clarity on Trump’s plans for U.S. troop withdrawal and an overall U.S. strategy, including toward Iran. Europe’s focus is on preventing another wave of Middle East migrants, a phenomenon that has already pushed the European political center toward the right.
The visit is also an “opportunity to start forging a more unified front” toward Chinese economic expansion, the administration official said, as well as an agreed approach to Putin, whom Macron will visit next month in St. Petersburg.
On Thursday, Macron and Merkel met in Berlin to discuss their shared concerns about Trump’s trade policies, and particularly the May 1 U.S. deadline for imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The European Union is preparing a proposal, for presentation to Trump before the deadline, to head off the levies.
“I’m an easy guy. I’m very simple. I’m straightforward,” Macron said on Fox. “It’s too complicated if you make war on everybody. You make trade war on China, trade war against Europe. War in Syria. War against Iran. Come on, it doesn’t work. You need allies. We are the ally.”
On each issue of the agenda, Macron’s overall goal is to pull the United States closer to Europe, something his partners on the continent believe he is uniquely situated to do.
After Merkel first met Trump here early last year, the chancellor returned to Germany aghast at what she saw as the new U.S. president’s disregard for the oldest U.S. allies and his apparent retreat from global leadership. In public speeches and private meetings, she told the French, British and others that perhaps it was time for Europe to take “our fate into our own hands.”
But “as they started analyzing” what that would mean in security and other terms, “it just didn’t compute,” Drozdiak said. “Their conclusion was, you’ve got to keep the U.S. engaged.”
James McAuley in Paris and Anne Gearan contributed to this report.
