LAFAYETTE, La. — For three straight nights, Jonah Slason had gone to sleep with a Bible in his bed.

Ever since a man sitting just rows behind him unleashed a barrage of gunfire on him and others at the Grand 16 Theater, Slason, 25, has found himself riffling through his dark burgundy Bible late into night looking for answers.

While he hasn’t found answers for why John Russell Houser opened fire that night – killing two and injuring nine others, Slason, a school choir teacher, said he has found love. “I’ve been hearing from everyone I ever knew, even back to high school, reaching out,” he said. “I’ve seen how this whole community has come together and just supported each other.”

In the wake of last week’s shooting, Lafayette has been a city in mourning. Marquee messages at stores have been replaced with prayers and remembrances. Hugs from friends have lingered a little longer. Messages of “#LafayetteStrong” have sprung up everywhere: at the farmers market, on houses and cars, handwritten by waitresses on restaurant receipts.

Those searching for answers have found little to satisfy.

Investigations of Houser, who took his own life during the shooting, have yielded details about his life in Alabama and Georgia. Family members in Georgia described Houser as mentally ill and said he had been estranged from them for years. And questions linger about how he obtained a gun at an Alabama pawn shop in February 2014, despite a past finding in Georgia that he was a danger to himself and others.

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NEW TIDBITS OF INFORMATION

In Lafayette, the police investigation has produced new tidbits about his final three weeks in the region. Renting a motel just off Interstate 10, Houser roamed widely along the sprawling highway, which cuts across the length of southern Louisiana.

Officials on Sunday revealed that they believe Houser had visited other cineplexes leading up to Thursday’s shooting.

“We do have reports from people of him going into other theaters,” Lafayette City-Parish President Joey Durel said in a phone interview. In recent days, at one theater, a couple reported seeing a man looking like Houser who had dressed up to look like a woman, Durel said.

The man behaved so erratically that the couple soon got up and left the movie.

After the shooting, authorities found wigs, glasses and other disguises in Houser’s motel, alongside journals.

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Louisiana state police on Sunday also said Houser had written in a journal found in his motel room the theater, date and screening time of the movie “Trainwreck,” where he carried out the shooting.

Police said they would probably release more information later this week from their investigation into Houser. But authorities acknowledged the limits of the data they were collecting.

“We may never know exactly why he chose Lafayette, why he chose Thursday night,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, said on Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” noting that the theater would have had security personnel on a Friday or Saturday night. “We may never have answers to all those questions.”

REQUESTED PRAYERS FOR HIS LIFE

More than an hour’s drive away in Lake Charles, at a church visited by Houser a week before the shooting, Pastor Tony Bourque has been wrestling with those questions as well. Houser had visited the church’s food pantry and sat sobbing for an hour and talking about his severe depression.

Bourque said he had been wrestling with what to tell his congregation on Sunday about the man who had asked them to pray for his life days before ravaging the lives of so many others.

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“People are asking why it happened,” he said. “It’s puzzling and it’s difficult. The world is a deeply broken place, filled with broken people.”

Ultimately, Bourque said, he decided he would focus Sunday’s message on the power of compassion for people like Houser and for all who are hurting. And like many churches throughout the region on Sunday, Bourque also set aside time to pray for the victims and their families.

Meanwhile, relatives are preparing to hold funerals on Monday for the two women Houser killed – Mayci Breaux, 21, a radiology student, and Jillian Johnson, 33, who was an active part of Lafayette’s art and business scene.

Over the weekend, the funerals became the focus of intense community angst as word spread of that the controversial Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church planned to protest the funerals. Westboro has become infamous for staging protests wherever they can to attract media attention, but its intentions especially struck a nerve in Lafayette because Houser had voiced support for Westboro in online postings.

Over the weekend, much of the pent-up grief and anger in Lafayette was directed at Westboro. Thousands joined a Facebook page aimed at stopping the church’s protests, with plans of forming a human chain to keep them away from the funeral.


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