Nanterre massacre

I don't really know what it is, probably an extract from his letter. It's a screenshot from a documentary.

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Quote :

Anyway, I will not end up in a psychiatric hospital, neither as a hobo in the streets.
My thoughts are full of hate.
I wish, within my capacity, to be equal to a BEN LADEN, a MILOSEVIC, a POL POT, a HITLER or a STALINE....

I have thought about it for so long because I am nothing and worthless
      FAREWELL
               DURN Richard

Neah wrote:

I don't really know what it is, probably an extract from his letter. It's a screenshot from a documentary.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Quote :

Anyway, I will not end up in a psychiatric hospital, neither as a hobo in the streets.
My thoughts are full of hate.
I wish, within my capacity, to be equal to a BEN LADEN, a MILOSEVIC, a POL POT, a HITLER or a STALINE....

I have thought about it for so long because I am nothing and worthless
      FAREWELL
               DURN Richard

Very interesting that he wishes to be equal to such infamous figures.

Tommy QTR wrote:

Neah wrote:

I don't really know what it is, probably an extract from his letter. It's a screenshot from a documentary.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Quote :

Anyway, I will not end up in a psychiatric hospital, neither as a hobo in the streets.
My thoughts are full of hate.
I wish, within my capacity, to be equal to a BEN LADEN, a MILOSEVIC, a POL POT, a HITLER or a STALINE....

I have thought about it for so long because I am nothing and worthless
      FAREWELL
               DURN Richard

Very interesting that he wishes to be equal to such infamous figures.

Yeah, although I think he probably talked about them regarding their destructive power, and I think it had nothing to do with ideology (he was on the left-wing, joined the Socialist party then the ecologists, but his political opinions had no influence on the shooting since he shot the mayoress who was a communist, and the majority of the councilors were from parties from the left). What I find weird and yet interesting about him is that he worked in the humanitarian field, wanted to be a teacher or work in politics. So it seems that he wanted to do good things, to help people (or maybe it was only for the need of adventure, travel and power? but I don't think so). And yet he had this need for destruction and hated people.

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

Neah wrote:

I don't really know what it is, probably an extract from his letter. It's a screenshot from a documentary.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]

Quote :

Anyway, I will not end up in a psychiatric hospital, neither as a hobo in the streets.
My thoughts are full of hate.
I wish, within my capacity, to be equal to a BEN LADEN, a MILOSEVIC, a POL POT, a HITLER or a STALINE....

I have thought about it for so long because I am nothing and worthless
      FAREWELL
               DURN Richard

Very interesting that he wishes to be equal to such infamous figures.

Yeah, although I think he probably talked about them regarding their destructive power, and I think it had nothing to do with ideology (he was on the left-wing but his political opinions had no influence on the shooting since he shot the mayoress who was a communist, and the majority of the councilors were from parties from the left). What I find weird and yet interesting about him is that he worked in the humanitarian field, wanted to be a teacher or work in politics. So it seems that he wanted to do good things, to help people (or maybe it was only for the need of adventure, travel and power? but I don't think so). And yet he had this need for destruction and hated people.

I think his depression got worse and he started to hate himself and other people more and more until he couldn't take it anymore.

Neah wrote:

What I find weird and yet interesting about him is that he worked in the humanitarian field, wanted to be a teacher or work in politics. So it seems that he wanted to do good things, to help people (or maybe it was only for the need of adventure, travel and power? but I don't think so). And yet he had this need for destruction and hated people.

I think he was just trying to find a purpose in life and it didn't work out.

An English article about the shooting:

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I always intend to post here but I lose my posts and give up so I just want to give a quick thank you to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (and also @Tommy QTR) for posting information about the case in this thread.

sscc wrote:

I always intend to post here but I lose my posts and give up so I just want to give a quick thank you to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (and also @Tommy QTR) for posting information about the case in this thread.

You're welcome! I am glad to hear that you are interested in this shooting too.

Sorry, those last weeks I was too lazy to finish the translation of the article that had many information about Durn. I did it a little more today, and I thought it was not good to keep publishing it in small parts in several posts because you have to search for my posts. So here is a re-post of the paragraphs I had already posted, and three new ones (in bold). Remember the first paragraph was very basic information that we already knew so I altered it to keep only new information, that is why it doesn't sound good.
I will edit this post each time I add a new paragraph and let you know when I do it.

Quote :

Richard Durn hesitated during the evening if he would commit the shooting or not. “During all this time, I wondered if I was going to move into action or not. During the last minutes of the meeting, I understood that I could not go back, it was now or never”, he told the police after the shooting. He shoot 38 bullets in 55 seconds. Durn had kept a bullet to commit suicide but was stopped by members of the meeting. “I was overpowered. They took my Smith & Wesson that was in my left inside pocket. It is at that moment that I shouted: “Kill me, kill me!”” He was then arrested and officers from the criminal squad thought he was “terribly excited”. At the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris, a doctor think the state of his mental health is ok for him to be in custody.

Richard Durn was born on December 3 1968 in Nanterre. His mother is Slovenian and his father is unknown. Richard Durn had an issue with not knowing his origins and with the fact that his mother did not want to talk to him about it. His mother, Stéfania, worked in the biscuit factory Heudeber then for Citroën. In 1968, she had a “loveless relation” with a “passing man” that she “buried” in her “private world”. Pregnant and without enough money to abort, Stéfania leave the maternity ward with her baby on Friday the 13th. “I knew it would bring me bad luck”, she sensed. She had trouble mothering this “withdrawn, shy, contemplative and cuddly little boy”, who yet learn well in school. “You cannot force yourself to love someone you didn’t want” said Stéfania. “I loved him little by little when he started to grow.” When he was a teenager, Richard Durn asked questions about his father. His mother only told him that he was an unwanted baby, “an accident”, that she was “forced to keep him”. She didn’t give any information. “But I had no pictures, nothing” Stéfania claimed. “Richard perceived it as a tragedy.”

At 18, Durn saw a psychiatrist who prescribed medicine. In 1990, Durn swallowed sixty pills to end his life. Two years later he tried to kill himself again and end up at the hospital Sainte-Anne. For the next ten years he received an irregular psychiatric support and went in humanitarian missions in countries in war: “I go there” he told his mother “because I have the hope that I could be killed or step on a mine.” He was a student at the university of Nanterre and was a supervisor in a middle school in the Hauts-de Seine. Since 1988, this strict and taciturn supervisor that people called “Robocop” was yet liked by one student, Gaël K. Gaël thought Durn was “very cultivated and super interesting when he talked about wars in the world”. He became his only friend. In 1993, Richard Durn, who talked four languages, went for the first time with a convoy in Bosnia and got back to his roots in the Balkans: “It is the only adventure in my life.” He got his degree in history in 1995, studied a political science master and became a member of the Socialist Party.

In 1997, Durn went to Israel with Gaël: “It was one of the very few times I saw Richard fulfilled, relaxed, with no darkness in his eyes. He had the face of a child.” After spending a week in Jerusalem youth hostel, Durn wants to commune with himself in Kyriat Arba Jewish colony on the tomb of the sionist extremist Barush Goldstein who murdered twenty-nine Palestinians in 1994. “Richard thought it was despicable but brave that a guy goes into a mosque with a gun and shoot” said Gaël. Durn also went to the Masada fortress where, in 74 AD, the Jewish members of the resistance who were surrounded by the Romans killed themselves in order not to surrender. On site, Durn lost his temper because of a trifle and threatened to kill his friend who, afraid, went back to France. “I thought you were going to kill me” said Gaël later. But when Richard said himself that he was “crazy”, his friend did not believe him.

Back in Nanterre, Richard Durn took drama lessons and insisted “to work on political texts”, according to his teacher who offered him to act in “The Playboy of the Western World” by the Irish author John Millington Synge. Durn’s role started with those words : « Before the day I killed my father.” Since 1996, Durn secretly trained at shooting and had a license for his two Glock pistols and a Smith Wesson. He carried them around in a bag. One day in 1998 he showed a firearm to the psychiatrist from Paris University Psychological Help Center: “I could kill people.” The doctor informed the Department of Health and Social Security of the Hauts-de-Seine that closed the file. He was not sectioned and was not forced to receive treatment. From time to time, Durn took antidepressants, Prozac, and kept making things worse for himself. “He was always running himself down: “I’m worthless”, “everything I do fall through, it doesn’t work”, “what use are my certificates to me?”, “what will I become?”” Gaël quotes.

Too old to keep working as a school supervisor, Durn became unemployed, and soon became a RMIste [“A RMIste is a person who receives the RMI, a social allowance aimed towards those unemployed persons who have not worked for long enough to claim unemployment benefit.”] At almost 30 years old, he was single and sponged off his mother who cleaned houses. He moved to an accommodation that Gaël found but went back to his mother’s, “unable to live alone”. In 1998 he led humanitarian trips to Montenegro, Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania. Joël Le Tensorer, president of the charity that helped Balkans, did not see Richard Durn as a hothead or as a borderline person but as a “solid man” who prepared convoys with “care and great rigour”.

But then again, Richard Durn faced a major failure that he mentions in his journal: “Octobre 9 1999 was an important date in my life as the coward and the moron that I am. As I realized that I was not accepted in the Bioforce school to become a humanitarian logistician, that I had no accommodation, no girlfriend (I had not made love for years nor during the summer holidays), I gave up life. I threw in the towel.” Durn became un-rationally distressed by a torn ligament in the knee. “I do not want to end up like a lame, like an ill person. I am more and more physically fucked-up” he wrote in 2001. “I have never known how to fight. I have never known how to love myself a little (without being navel-gazing or egocentric). I am always putting my own limits on myself. I am always giving people a stick and making it easier for them to flagellate me. Enough of being the depressed man and the token pathetic guy (at best). I am tired of seeing my body and my face grow old, tired of noting that time goes and that I have nothing.” “I am fed up with always having in my head this sentence that always comes: “I didn’t live, I’m 30 and I lived nothing.””

It seems like with a lot of shootings this could have been easily prevented if the warnings Durn showed weren't ignored.

I found a interesting Swiss article that compares Nanterre to the Zug Massacre:

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Tommy QTR wrote:

I found a interesting Swiss article that compares Nanterre to the Zug Massacre:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

As a side note I find it kind of interesting that the Zug massacre is pretty much the only mass shooting Switzerland has ever had.

QuestionMark wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

I found a interesting Swiss article that compares Nanterre to the Zug Massacre:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

As a side note I find it kind of interesting that the Zug massacre is pretty much the only mass shooting Switzerland has ever had.

Well Switzerland has got a really good healthcare system and is less of a violent country than the U.S.

QuestionMark wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

I found a interesting Swiss article that compares Nanterre to the Zug Massacre:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

As a side note I find it kind of interesting that the Zug massacre is pretty much the only mass shooting Switzerland has ever had.

Despite having, from what I heard, a very liberal gun law. But obviously gun control supporters prefer to ignore this successful example.

Neah wrote:

QuestionMark wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

I found a interesting Swiss article that compares Nanterre to the Zug Massacre:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

As a side note I find it kind of interesting that the Zug massacre is pretty much the only mass shooting Switzerland has ever had.

Despite having, from what I heard, a very liberal gun law. But obviously gun control supporters prefer to ignore this successful example.

Switzerland has one of the most liberal gun laws in the world, yet has very low death rates. Anti-gun people fail to realise there are dozens of factors when it comes mass shootings and other gun crimes.

CBS News Article about Durn's Suicide:

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I wonder if he would still be alive if he didn't commit the shooting?

Tommy QTR wrote:

I wonder if he would still be alive if he didn't commit the shooting?

Well he tried to commit suicide once or twice so maybe he would have tried again and managed to kill himself. And yet he said that the shooting was partly because he was too afraid to die alone. I can very well imagine him still alive and very unhappy right now. And I don't know if his mother is still alive today, but I guess he would have remained alone his whole life. He would have been 50.

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

I wonder if he would still be alive if he didn't commit the shooting?

Well he tried to commit suicide once or twice so maybe he would have tried again and managed to kill himself. And yet he said that the shooting was partly because he was too afraid to die alone. I can very well imagine him still alive and very unhappy right now. And I don't know if his mother is still alive today, but I guess he would have remained alone his whole life. He would have been 50.

I think he would of tried to commit suicide as well, it's sad that he didn't get the help he needed.

Tommy QTR wrote:

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

I wonder if he would still be alive if he didn't commit the shooting?

Well he tried to commit suicide once or twice so maybe he would have tried again and managed to kill himself. And yet he said that the shooting was partly because he was too afraid to die alone. I can very well imagine him still alive and very unhappy right now. And I don't know if his mother is still alive today, but I guess he would have remained alone his whole life. He would have been 50.

I think he would of tried to commit suicide as well, it's sad that he didn't get the help he needed.

He got help when he was younger but it didn't work. Sometimes I have the impression that some people can only feel sad and depressed. Almost as if they were "made" to feel that way.

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

I wonder if he would still be alive if he didn't commit the shooting?

Well he tried to commit suicide once or twice so maybe he would have tried again and managed to kill himself. And yet he said that the shooting was partly because he was too afraid to die alone. I can very well imagine him still alive and very unhappy right now. And I don't know if his mother is still alive today, but I guess he would have remained alone his whole life. He would have been 50.

I think he would of tried to commit suicide as well, it's sad that he didn't get the help he needed.

He got help when he was younger but it didn't work. Sometimes I have the impression that some people can only feel sad and depressed. Almost as if they were "made" to feel that way.

I think with the right medication and therapy he could of lived a fairly normal live. He definitely shouldn't of been able to own a Gun Licence.

Richard Durn must be the most unusual way for a shooter to an hero.

Ziamber II wrote:

Richard Durn must be the most unusual way for a shooter to an hero.

Yeah I was surprised he managed to jump out the window, my guess it was after they done interrogating him and were leading him back to his Jail Cell.

Tommy QTR wrote:

Ziamber II wrote:

Richard Durn must be the most unusual way for a shooter to an hero.

Yeah I was surprised he managed to jump out the window, my guess it was after they done interrogating him and were leading him back to his Jail Cell.

It was while they were interrogating him. There were written and spoken instructions given to his guardians so that they knew he was suicidal. In fact, it is quite ironical because what enabled him to commit suicide was what was supposed to prevent him from killing himself (or in other cases to prevent attacks I suppose): he had no laces on his shoes, which is why the policeman who grabbed his foot only managed to keep the shoe.

Tommy QTR wrote:

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

I wonder if he would still be alive if he didn't commit the shooting?

Well he tried to commit suicide once or twice so maybe he would have tried again and managed to kill himself. And yet he said that the shooting was partly because he was too afraid to die alone. I can very well imagine him still alive and very unhappy right now. And I don't know if his mother is still alive today, but I guess he would have remained alone his whole life. He would have been 50.

I think he would of tried to commit suicide as well, it's sad that he didn't get the help he needed.

He got help when he was younger but it didn't work. Sometimes I have the impression that some people can only feel sad and depressed. Almost as if they were "made" to feel that way.

I think with the right medication and therapy he could of lived a fairly normal live. 

I can't remember what the article's name was, but I do remember reading an article talking about how a significant number of depressed people don't respond positively to any kind of treatment.

QuestionMark wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

I wonder if he would still be alive if he didn't commit the shooting?

Well he tried to commit suicide once or twice so maybe he would have tried again and managed to kill himself. And yet he said that the shooting was partly because he was too afraid to die alone. I can very well imagine him still alive and very unhappy right now. And I don't know if his mother is still alive today, but I guess he would have remained alone his whole life. He would have been 50.

I think he would of tried to commit suicide as well, it's sad that he didn't get the help he needed.

He got help when he was younger but it didn't work. Sometimes I have the impression that some people can only feel sad and depressed. Almost as if they were "made" to feel that way.

I think with the right medication and therapy he could of lived a fairly normal live. 

I can't remember what the article's name was, but I do remember reading an article talking about how a significant number of depressed people don't respond positively to any kind of treatment.

Still I think it's better that they get some kind of treatment rather than suffering in silence.

All the Pictures I can find of Durn:

I wonder what he would of looked like as a child?

Tommy QTR wrote:

I wonder what he would of looked like as a child?

Me too, I searched for other pictures but unfortunately that's all I found. Even when I search for information about it on the internet, I always end up finding the same French websites.

Neah wrote:

Tommy QTR wrote:

I wonder what he would of looked like as a child?

Me too, I searched for other pictures but unfortunately that's all I found. Even when I search for information about it on the internet, I always end up finding the same French websites.

Yeah it's a shame there isn't that much information on this shooting or Durn.

I found another news report on the shooting:



This gives us a lot more information, not only does more footage of the wounded being evacuated, but also interviews with survivors, police, and politicians, footage of Durn's house, interview with his mother (although we don't actually see her), interview with a neighbour and others who knew him. We also find out that his gun club was raided by police, comparisons to other French Mass Shootings and the Zug Massacre in Switzerland, and a interview with a psychologist. The section on Durn and the shooting ends on the 22:47 mark.

I realized yesterday that I never finished translating the article, so here is the whole article, I've added the end (after the ----).

Quote :

Richard Durn hesitated during the evening if he would commit the shooting or not. “During all this time, I wondered if I was going to move into action or not. During the last minutes of the meeting, I understood that I could not go back, it was now or never”, he told the police after the shooting. He shot 38 bullets in 55 seconds. Durn had kept a bullet to commit suicide but was stopped by members of the meeting. “I was overpowered. They took my Smith & Wesson that was in my left inside pocket. It is at that moment that I shouted: “Kill me, kill me!”” He was then arrested and officers from the criminal squad thought he was “terribly excited”. At the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris, a doctor thought the state of his mental health was ok for him to be in custody.

Richard Durn was born on December 3 1968 in Nanterre. His mother is Slovenian and his father is unknown. Richard Durn had an issue with not knowing his origins and with the fact that his mother did not want to talk to him about it. His mother, Stéfania, worked in the biscuit factory Heudeber then for Citroën. In 1968, she had a “loveless relation” with a “passing man” that she “buried” in her “private world”. Pregnant and without enough money to abort, Stéfania left the maternity ward with her baby on Friday the 13th. “I knew it would bring me bad luck”, she sensed. She had trouble mothering this “withdrawn, shy, contemplative and cuddly little boy”, who yet learn well in school. “You cannot force yourself to love someone you didn’t want” said Stéfania. “I loved him little by little when he started to grow.” When he was a teenager, Richard Durn asked questions about his father. His mother only told him that he was an unwanted baby, “an accident”, that she was “forced to keep him”. She didn’t give any information. “But I had no pictures, nothing” Stéfania claimed. “Richard perceived it as a tragedy.”

At 18, Durn saw a psychiatrist who prescribed medicine. In 1990, Durn swallowed sixty pills to ended his life. Two years later he tried to kill himself again and end up at the hospital Sainte-Anne. For the next ten years he received an irregular psychiatric support and went in humanitarian missions in countries in war: “I go there” he told his mother “because I have the hope that I could be killed or step on a mine.” He was a student at the university of Nanterre and was a supervisor in a middle school in the Hauts-de Seine. Since 1988, this strict and taciturn supervisor that people called “Robocop” was yet liked by one student, Gaël K. Gaël thought Durn was “very cultivated and super interesting when he talked about wars in the world”. He became his only friend. In 1993, Richard Durn, who talked four languages, went for the first time with a convoy in Bosnia and got back to his roots in the Balkans: “It is the only adventure in my life.” He got his degree in history in 1995, studied a political science master and became a member of the Socialist Party.
In 1997, Durn went to Israel with Gaël: “It was one of the very few times I saw Richard fulfilled, relaxed, with no darkness in his eyes. He had the face of a child.” After spending a week in Jerusalem youth hostel, Durn went to commune with himself in Kyriat Arba Jewish colony on the tomb of the Zionist extremist Barush Goldstein who murdered twenty-nine Palestinians in 1994. “Richard thought it was despicable but brave that a guy goes into a mosque with a gun and shoot” said Gaël. Durn also went to the Masada fortress where, in 74 AD, the Jewish members of the resistance who were surrounded by the Romans killed themselves in order not to surrender. On site, Durn lost his temper because of a trifle and threatened to kill his friend who, afraid, went back to France. “I thought you were going to kill me” said Gaël later. But when Richard said about himself that he was “crazy”, his friend did not believe him.

Richard Durn hesitated during the evening if he would commit the shooting or not. “During all this time, I wondered if I was going to move into action or not. During the last minutes of the meeting, I understood that I could not go back, it was now or never”, he told the police after the shooting. He shoot 38 bullets in 55 seconds. Durn had kept a bullet to commit suicide but was stopped by members of the meeting. “I was overpowered. They took my Smith & Wesson that was in my left inside pocket. It is at that moment that I shouted: “Kill me, kill me!”” He was then arrested and officers from the criminal squad thought he was “terribly excited”. At the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris, a doctor think the state of his mental health is ok for him to be in custody.

Richard Durn was born on December 3 1968 in Nanterre. His mother is Slovenian and his father is unknown. Richard Durn had an issue with not knowing his origins and with the fact that his mother did not want to talk to him about it. His mother, Stéfania, worked in the biscuit factory Heudeber then for Citroën. In 1968, she had a “loveless relation” with a “passing man” that she “buried” in her “private world”. Pregnant and without enough money to abort, Stéfania leave the maternity ward with her baby on Friday the 13th. “I knew it would bring me bad luck”, she sensed. She had trouble mothering this “withdrawn, shy, contemplative and cuddly little boy”, who yet learn well in school. “You cannot force yourself to love someone you didn’t want” said Stéfania. “I loved him little by little when he started to grow.” When he was a teenager, Richard Durn asked questions about his father. His mother only told him that he was an unwanted baby, “an accident”, that she was “forced to keep him”. She didn’t give any information. “But I had no pictures, nothing” Stéfania claimed. “Richard perceived it as a tragedy.”

At 18, Durn saw a psychiatrist who prescribed medicine. In 1990, Durn swallowed sixty pills to end his life. Two years later he tried to kill himself again and end up at the hospital Sainte-Anne. For the next ten years he received an irregular psychiatric support and went in humanitarian missions in countries in war: “I go there” he told his mother “because I have the hope that I could be killed or step on a mine.” He was a student at the university of Nanterre and was a supervisor in a middle school in the Hauts-de Seine. Since 1988, this strict and taciturn supervisor that people called “Robocop” was yet liked by one student, Gaël K. Gaël thought Durn was “very cultivated and super interesting when he talked about wars in the world”. He became his only friend. In 1993, Richard Durn, who talked four languages, went for the first time with a convoy in Bosnia and got back to his roots in the Balkans: “It is the only adventure in my life.” He got his degree in history in 1995, studied a political science master and became a member of the Socialist Party.

In 1997, Durn went to Israel with Gaël: “It was one of the very few times I saw Richard fulfilled, relaxed, with no darkness in his eyes. He had the face of a child.” After spending a week in Jerusalem youth hostel, Durn wants to commune with himself in Kyriat Arba Jewish colony on the tomb of the sionist extremist Barush Goldstein who murdered twenty-nine Palestinians in 1994. “Richard thought it was despicable but brave that a guy goes into a mosque with a gun and shoot” said Gaël. Durn also went to the Masada fortress where, in 74 AD, the Jewish members of the resistance who were surrounded by the Romans killed themselves in order not to surrender. On site, Durn lost his temper because of a trifle and threatened to kill his friend who, afraid, went back to France. “I thought you were going to kill me” said Gaël later. But when Richard said himself that he was “crazy”, his friend did not believe him.

Back in Nanterre, Richard Durn took drama lessons and insisted “to work on political texts”, according to his teacher who offered him to act in “The Playboy of the Western World” by the Irish author John Millington Synge. Durn’s role started with those words : « Before the day I killed my father.” Since 1996, Durn secretly trained at shooting and had a license for his two Glock pistols and a Smith Wesson. He carried them around in a bag. One day in 1998 he showed a firearm to the psychiatrist from Paris University Psychological Help Center: “I could kill people.” The doctor informed the Department of Health and Social Security of the Hauts-de-Seine that closed the file. He was not sectioned and was not forced to receive treatment. From time to time, Durn took antidepressants, Prozac, and kept making things worse for himself. “He was always running himself down: “I’m worthless”, “everything I do fall through, it doesn’t work”, “what use are my certificates to me?”, “what will I become?”” Gaël quotes.

Too old to keep working as a school supervisor, Durn became unemployed, and soon became a RMIste [“A RMIste is a person who receives the RMI, a social allowance aimed towards those unemployed persons who have not worked for long enough to claim unemployment benefit.”] At almost 30 years old, he was single and sponged off his mother who cleaned houses. He moved to an accommodation that Gaël found but went back to his mother’s, “unable to live alone”. In 1998 he led humanitarian trips to Montenegro, Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania. Joël Le Tensorer, president of the charity that helped Balkans, did not see Richard Durn as a hothead or as a borderline person but as a “solid man” who prepared convoys with “care and great rigour”.

But then again, Richard Durn faced a major failure that he mentions in his journal: “Octobre 9 1999 was an important date in my life as the coward and the moron that I am. As I realized that I was not accepted in the Bioforce school to become a humanitarian logistician, that I had no accommodation, no girlfriend (I had not made love for years nor during the summer holidays), I gave up life. I threw in the towel.” Durn became un-rationally distressed by a torn ligament in the knee. “I do not want to end up like a lame, like an ill person. I am more and more physically fucked-up” he wrote in 2001. “I have never known how to fight. I have never known how to love myself a little (without being navel-gazing or egocentric). I am always putting my own limits on myself. I am always giving people a stick and making it easier for them to flagellate me. Enough of being the depressed man and the token pathetic guy (at best). I am tired of seeing my body and my face grow old, tired of noting that time goes and that I have nothing.” “I am fed up with always having in my head this sentence that always comes: “I didn’t live, I’m 30 and I lived nothing.””

----

He tried to bring about “determining meetings” in order to “save” his skin. He was an activist for the local branch of the League of Human Rights and with candidates for the Green Party list “Let’s Reinvent Nanterre” at local elections but he had the impression that “he is taken for an idiot”. Nanterre city hall proposed him a social housing but he refused it, according to Gaël because of the “mouldy walls and cockroaches”. “It annoyed him. He would say: “I do things for my city, I try to get involved, and them, all they can find to help me is a rubbish place where I would end up killing myself because I cannot live in it anyway.”

He came back from the Genes anti-globalization summit in July 2001 more disgusted than ever by “politicians” who “manipulate us and line their pocket” convinced that “the only solution is violence”. Confined in his room, the “bastard” as he called himself still demanded information about his unknown father. As testified by a letter to a friend in the end of 2001, Richard Durn had to wait until the age of 33 to know a little more: “My mother finally revealed who could be my potential father. It seems that he was an Algerian. My mother knew several men. Contraception was not widespread. I bear no judgement toward my mother. She has always been brave and alone. No-one ever advised nor helped her. The only thing is that, the things she has told me, too bad she has not told them earlier. I would have known where I came from. It may be important.” He felt like “a living-dead”, haunted by “ideas of massacre” and of suicide. “I am mad, I became a hobo” he wrote in his diary: “I am in pain and I am full of hate, but I hold it back.” In the end of 2000 he did not renew his gun-owning license but kept them without anyone worrying about it.

On March 26 of 2002, Richard Durn wrote a last letter to his mother: “Mother, I should have been dead since a long time. I am good at nothing in life, I cannot even die without causing harm. Now, cowardice is over. I have to die at least feeling free and getting off. That’s why I have to kill people. Once in my life I would reach orgasm.”

The evening, he goes to the Nanterre townhall armed as if he were at war. He would explain to investigators that he shot « randomly without picking any individual in particular nor political parties” of councilors, expect with the communist mayor, Jacqueline Fraysse. I deliberately aimed at her because of her status as a mayor and because she embodies an irrevocable apparatchik which creates a cronyism system and which typically represents the hypocritical red upper class.

In custody, Durn reeled off his antisocial madness and ended the official report by saying: “I want to die because I am a thing, a rubbish.” Next day, on morning, Richard Durn jumped “like a rocket” through fanlight to fall from four flours in the yard of the 36 quai des Orfèvres, without a scream.

Still very sad and pathetic, but also really straight to the point, as always with Durn. I think he is the shooter for whom I feel the more sympathy.

France's Jared Lee Loughner.