Dion Terres (Kenosha McDonald's, 1993)

(Most of the info was taken from news articles written at the time of the incident)

On August 10, 1993, shortly after 1:30 p.m., 26 years old Dion Terres walked through a side door at a McDonalds on Kenosha, Wisconsin. He yelled for everyone to leave and then opened fire with his.44 Magnum, on a crowd of around 20 people.

Most of them managed to hide or run away, but three people were shot:
-Sandra Kenega, 42, died of a gunshot wound to the stomach around 13 hours after the shooting, at the Kenosha Medical Center. She ran a hair salon two blocks east of the restaurant.
A statement from her family said: "Sandy Kenaga was a fine daughter, a beautiful wife and a wonderful mother. She was giving and caring and extremely conscious and sensitive of other people. Her pleasure in living was in doing things for others.
She made those around her happy - she went out of her way to make them happy. I think of one word that would have to be in any description of Sandy: She was vibrant."

-Terres also fatally shot Bruce Bojesen, 50, in the head. He was a self-employed carpenter who lived in Silver Lake, a town 20 miles west of Kenosha.

-The lone shooting victim to survive was Kirk Hauptmann, 18, a sophomore in pre-medicine at the University of Pennsylvania who was home in Kenosha for the summer and living just a block away from the gunman. A bullet grazed his right forearm.

After of which Terres puts the .44 Magnum, silver-plated revolver to his own head and fires a fatal round.

On the day of the shooting, Terres dropped an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle as he left his car to enter the McDonald's restaurant. Kenosha police have theorized that Terres had planned to use the rifle, but that he panicked or may have become disoriented smoking marijuana when he locked himself out of his car and left a loaded clip of ammunition on his seat.


Possible motive/triggering events:
Kenosha Police Capt. Robert Young speculated that Terres might have been angry about the end of his relationship with his 16-year-old girlfriend around a week before, and about the loss of his job at the Motorola plant in Libertyville last spring.

His ex-girlfriend, Kimberly Sinkler, said she broke up with Terres when he became too possessive, started following her, and once threatened to kill himself if they broke up. Meanwhile, the spokesman for Motorola said Terres was terminated from his job in March when he failed to show up for work for three consecutive days without bothering to offer any explanation.


Some random facts:
-Terres had lived in Kenosha since September, 1992, and before that he lived in Arlington Heights, where he attended Hersey High School. There, he lived with his mother, Sharon Winters, in the Brandenberry Park condominium complex.

-Police said Terres’ home contained newspaper clippings about murders and information about psychiatric treatment Terres had been getting in Barrington, Ill., a Chicago suburb close to his home town of Arlington Heights, Ill.

-Shortly after graduating from Hersey High School in Arlington Heights in 1986, Dion Terres ran into a former classmate and bragged to her that he had joined the military, although there’s no record of him being on the military.

-His ex-girlfriend recounted how just a few days before the shooting Terres had become enraged when a Jehovah's Witness came to his door. He threatened to shoot the man, then ran upstairs, jumped into his fatigues and dashed back downstairs brandishing his rifle. But it was too late to assault the frightened missionary, she said.

-The mother of his old girlfriend said the shooter frequently showed up at their doorstep bleeding from his most recent encounter. Even at his job at a Northbrook restaurant, he once had a fight, she said.

-Toxicology tests on blood and urine samples taken from Terres' body showed traces of marijuana, but it is impossible to pinpoint whether he smoked it shortly before he entered the McDonald's on Aug. 10 or as long as a month earlier, said Roger Johnson, Kenosha County deputy chief medical examiner.

-The McDonalds reopened less than 24 hours after the incident.

-Terres’ car was a 1989 Chevrolet Cavalier.

-The band “Abuse” included 30 seconds of Terres’ audio at the beginning of their song “Waste of Flesh”, from the album “A Sunday Morning Killing Spree”.


Terres’ suicide tape:
On August 9, a day before the shooting, Terres recorded a 40 minutes tape on his home on Kenosha. It was found in a camcorder left in his car. Some portions of the video are available; here there will be mentioned some quotes and descriptions from the parts that aren’t available. These quotes are not in order.

-The tape reportedly opened with a picture of the .44 magnum revolver and an AR-15 assault rifle.

-Terres implies in the video that the world should be thankful he was planning to take his own life at that time.
"It's better this way 'cause if I wasn't going to do this now I would have ended up being one of the worst serial killers in this country's history-without a doubt, without a doubt," he said.
Terres mentioned on the tape his admiration for serial murderers Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy; and the killer or killers of seven employees at the Brown's Chicken & Pasta restaurant in Palatine in January, 1993. Talking about Gacy, he says:
"That's crazy man. All he had to do was drive five minutes to Harlem-Irving Plaza (in Norridge) . . . There are so many kids over there he never would have got caught, never."
"Dahmer, man," he said. "I understand that son of a bitch so good. That's what I would have become because I can't control myself anymore."

-"It's too late for help. I went for help when I worked at Motorola," he said. "When I told this guy the real truth -what really was inside me- he freaked, man. He's like, `Could you please wait outside for a minute.' He calls me back in the office. I guess he called someone and -some doctor- I guess they wanted me to commit myself that night, you know."

-He linked his fascination with murder to sexual abuse he suffered as a child.
Terres blamed male relatives for the abuse, cursed his mother for tolerating it, and filmed the weapons and ammunition he planned to use for "a little bit of payback time."
Terres pointed the camera at a recently purchased marijuana pipe. He admitted to smoking a lot of pot, but said he didn't cause trouble or drive after he got high.
He said he longed for a different childhood.
"It's sad. It's too bad. Once in a while I wonder what it would be like to feel that, to be part of a family. Grow up nice, y'know, and feel all that good stuff."

-"Well, like I was saying," Terres states. "I have had enough (of life) and as you can see, I went out this morning and I got some ammunition and I got some clips ready. Actually I didn't know this was such a small caliber gun. I thought this was an AK (a semi-automatic assault rifle). So what are you going to do? Live and learn, right."

-He said the only happy time of his life was 1982 through 1985 (during high school), when he was high, drunk or stoned on acid all of the time.
Terres said he started getting sick while a senior in high school, when he also began ripping his toenails off with pliers. Terres displayed a sack of the blood-crusted nails and wore them on a string around his neck as he filmed the suicide video.
"This is my spirit pouch, my sacred bag," he said. "It contains part of me."

-He said he was talking to Abraham Lincoln. He said he dug Abraham Lincoln up, to put him in the bathtub.

-He makes no reference in the tape to the restaurant but rambles on about taking his own life and some others as well or maybe going to the beach to do some shooting.

-As the videotape draws to a close, Terres speaks into a mirror and says he already has killed all the fish in his fish tank, and then says:
"Goodbye everyone… I am going to be tormented in hell for eternity."

-The entire audio portion of the tape was broadcast, without censoring, on WLIP-AM. David Cole, the station's news director, said listeners wanted to hear what Terres said.


-Pictures:

Spoiler:

-Videos:
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