A 67-year-old man who opened fire at a Minnesota health clinic, killing one staff member and wounding four others, previously threatened to carry out a mass shooting at the facility, according to a police report.
The man was unhappy with the healthcare he had received, the authorities said. Bomb technicians were also investigating a suspicious device left there and others at a motel where he was staying.
All five victims were rushed to the hospital, and a hospital spokeswoman confirmed the one death on Tuesday night. Three remained in stable but critical condition and a fourth had been discharged.
The attack happened on Tuesday morning at an Allina clinic in Buffalo, a community of about 15,000 people roughly 40 miles north-west of Minneapolis. Authorities said Gregory Paul Ulrich, of Buffalo, opened fire at the facility and was arrested before noon.
He remained jailed in Wright county on Wednesday and was expected to appear in court on Thursday.
Though police said it was too early to tell if Ulrich had targeted a specific doctor, court records show he at one point had been ordered to have no contact with a man whose name matches that of a doctor at the clinic.
As authorities searched the clinic for more victims, they found the suspicious device and evacuated the building, the Wright county sheriff, Sean Deringer, said.
It was not immediately clear whether that device exploded, but TV footage showed several shattered plate-glass windows at the clinic. Deringer said suspicious devices were also found at a local Super 8 motel where Ulrich had been staying, and there were at least two shattered windows there as well.
According to a police report, Ulrich threatened to carry out a mass shooting at the clinic in October 2018, with a doctor telling investigators that Ulrich had talked about “shooting, blowing things up, and practicing different scenarios of how to get revenge”.
He said Ulrich told him he dreamed about exacting revenge on the people who “tortured” him, referring to issues he had with back surgeries and the medication he was prescribed for them.
Ulrich told police he had just been telling the doctor about his dreams and that he wouldn’t actually do anything, and police took him for a mental health evaluation at a facility in Monticello, the report says.
Allina medical staff believed Ulrich might act on the threats and filed paperwork barring him from the company’s property, which police delivered to his home the next month.
The Buffalo police chief, Pat Budke, on Tuesday became emotional and had to pause during a news conference as he told reporters “our heart breaks as a community”.
While an exact motive was not immediately known, Budke said Ulrich has had a long history of conflict with healthcare clinics in the area.
Deringer said Ulrich was well known to law enforcement before the attack, and there were calls for service dating back to 2003.
A 2018 charge of violating a harassment restraining order was dismissed last April when the prosecutor said Ulrich was “found mentally incompetent to proceed”.
An order issued in 2018 and 2019 in the harassment case showed Ulrich was to have no contact with a man. The order did not identify that man beyond giving his name, but the name appeared to match that of a doctor listed on the clinic’s staff list.
It was not known if that doctor was among Ulrich’s victims.
Richard Ulrich said his brother, Gregory, had worked in construction and became addicted to opioids a few years ago after he had back surgery for an old injury he had suffered on the job, the Washington Post reported.
“He started taking these opioid-type pain medications and he would call and tell me they should be giving him more; he said he was in pain,” said Richard Ulrich.
“He would call, and he seemed to be upset with the doctors and frustrated that they wouldn’t give him any medication. That’s probably what set him off. That’s my guess.”
A court services agent who conducted a pre-sentence investigation wrote in a June 2019 filing that he had just learned that Ulrich had applied to police for a “permit to purchase” – apparently meaning a permit to buy a gun – but had not yet been approved.
The agent said he “highly recommended” that Ulrich “not be allowed to have use of or possession of any dangerous weapons or firearms as a condition of his probation”.
