United States Capitol Shooting Incident (1998) - The Suspect

The Suspect

The suspect, Russell Eugene Weston, Jr., known as Rusty, was born December 28, 1956 and grew up in Valmeyer, Illinois. Weston attended Valmeyer High School, the only high school in a town of 900 people. Shortly after graduating high school in 1974, Weston moved to Rimini, Montana, rarely returning to Valmeyer. The only attempt his high school classmates made at inviting him to a class reunion was returned with obscenities written across it. Many of Weston's Montana neighbors had disliked him, and often ignored him. They considered him to be unusual, and sometimes eccentric. Weston had once thought that his neighbor was using his television satellite dish to spy on his actions. He also believed that Navy SEALs were hiding in his cornfield.

He was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic six years before the shooting and spent fifty-three days in a mental hospital after threatening a Montana resident. He was released after testing as being of no danger to himself or anyone else. Eighteen months before the shooting, he moved back to Valmeyer from Montana. Once home, he was known to compulsively hack at trees which filled his back yard following the Mississippi River floods of 1993. There was so much downed timber on his family's homestead that they had to ask him to stop cutting at trees. Two days prior to the Capitol shooting, at his grandmother's insistence to do something about nearby cats which were becoming a nuisance, Weston shot and killed 14 cats with a single barreled shotgun, leaving several in a bucket and burying the rest.

Following the Capitol shooting, Weston was transferred to a psychiatric center at Butner Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina. In an interview with a court-appointed psychiatrist he explained that he stormed the Capitol to prevent the United States from being annihilated by disease and legions of cannibals.

He has never been charged with any crime due to apparent mental instability. One contentious issue of Weston's incarceration is the issue of forced medication. Weston has thus far refused to take any medications voluntarily. His lawyers helped enable this, in order to protect him from the death penalty. In May 2001, a federal judge authorized doctors to treat Weston involuntarily. A panel from a federal appeals court ruled in July 2001 that Weston could be forced to take the drugs which he was forced to do for 120 days. He remains in the Butner facility indefinitely.