California...
A Riverside County, California, police SWAT Team, on Thursday, had to shoot and kill a gunman who invaded a halfway house looking to kill one of the policemen who was involved in the 1991 Rodney King case. Before being killed by police the subject, identified as 34-year-old Randall Craig Tolbert, shot and killed a 67-year-old man, shot and wounded another man and beat a woman. The wounded man only suffered a graze wound to the head.
The 67-year-old male victim who was killed was only at the halfway house helping to install a vending machine. Authorities say that former Los Angeles Police sergeant Stacey Koon was Tolbert's intended target. Koon who was sentenced to be a resident at the halfway house was not there because he was having Thanksgiving with his family.
Tolbert burst into the Re-Entry Community Corrections Center in the afternoon. A friend of the gunman said that Tolbert wanted to kill Koon on Wednesday night. The friend said, "He was drinking ... and he wanted to do it last night. He just wanted to kill that guy. Relatives of Tolbert were apparently able to talk him out of murdering Koon on Wednesday night.
A resident at the halfway house described what happened after Tolbert arrived there, "He had one of the staff members around the throat and a gun at his waist. The staff member started talking to him, and he got out of the room long enough for me to get out of the window and go call 911."
Riverside County Police arrived at the scene and within seconds of hearing additional shots from the halfway house and hearing Tolbert screaming about killing someone else, a SWAT team stormed into the building. A Riverside County Sheriff's Police spokesman said that Tolbert "fired a couple of rounds at them, and then they returned fire." The gunman was killed in the barrage of police bullets.
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