Larry Russell Dawson, Antioch and Capitol Violence

On Monday, March 28, 2016, at about 2:39 p.m. ET, an armed man was fired upon by U.S. Capitol Police when he arrived at the Capitol Visitor Center carrying a weapon, which reportedly discharged, wounding one female bystander. That female civilian was injured by shrapnel. No U.S. Capitol Police officers were injured, despite early reports they were.

There was reportedly some confusion as the day began with a scheduled lockdown drill. "THIS IS A DRILL," an early morning memo notified Capitol staffers. "EXERCISE EXERCISE."

The suspect has been identified as Larry Russell Dawson from Antioch, Tennessee, according to multiple media reports.

The incident caused the Capitol and the White House to be shutdown or placed under a shelter-in-place order for a short amount of time. The Capitol lockdown was lifted. The incident occurred during the peak of the Cherry Blossom Festival, as the March spring break vacation brought thousands of tourists to D.C.

Larry Russell Dawson (pictured), who views himself as a pastor, was known to the Capitol Police.

ABC News and NBC News report police have identified Larry Dawson of Antioch, Tennessee as the gunman who allegedly drew a [pellet] gun at the visitors center on Monday. U.S. Capitol Police would not confirm or deny it was Dawson, 66, at a press conference but said he was previously known to them. In October, Dawson was caught yelling he was a "Prophet of God" from the balcony of the House of Representatives.

On October 22, 2015, Dawson was arrested on charges of assault on a police officer and unlawful conduct at the Capitol, according to a police report obtained exclusively by The Daily Beast. Dawson also allegedly resisted arrest and ran from police, according to the report.

(According to MSNBC, Larry Russell Dawson died at the hospital on Monday evening. This appears to be a false report.)

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Who is the suspect?

LARRY RUSSELL DAWSON is a Funeral Director and Embalmer licensed to practice in Tennessee. The address on file for LARRY RUSSELL DAWSON is ANTIOCH, TN 37013-3932. This licensed professional license is not current. The license was granted 04/17/1972 and expired on 06/30/2004. Source.

The name Dawson originates with the nickname of Dave, Daw. Dawson means David's son.

Dawson is not a name we hear too often, regarding violence. It will be recalled, nevertheless, that on September 13, 2006, a college shooting occurred when 25-year-old Kimveer Gill stormed Montreal's Dawson College's cafeteria, and sprayed students with bullets, killing 18-year-old Anastassia De Sousa and wounding 11 others, before turning the gun on himself.

Capitol Violence:

January 30, 1835: There was an attempted assassination of Andrew Jackson at the Capitol. President Andrew Jackson survived an assassination attempt after leaving a funeral at the Capitol. The gunman's weapon misfired, sparing the president who then confronted the perpetrator, clubbing him with a walking cane. The attacker told his interrogators that he was a deposed English King—specifically, Richard III, dead since 1485—and that Jackson was his clerk. He was deemed insane. The assassin, an unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence from England, was confined to a mental institution.

March 1, 1954: Four Puerto Rican nationalists (Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andres Figueroa Cordero, and Irving Flores Rodríguez) fired 30 rounds from a balcony over looking the House chambers, as an immigration bill was being debated, injuring five congressman. The four assailants were imprisoned. One was released in 1978 and the remaining three in 1979. The lawmakers all recovered.

March 1, 1971: The Weather Underground exploded a bomb in the United States Capitol, in a Senate bathroom—no one was injured. The Weather Underground issued a communiqué saying that the bombing was "in protest of the U.S. invasion of Laos". No one was arrested directly related to this bombing.

July 24, 1998: Russell Eugene Weston, Jr. (a paranoid schizophrenia) killed Detective John Gibson and Officer Jacob Chestnut of the Capitol police, when Weston stormed the Capitol building. Weston was originally from Valmeyer, Illinois, and then moved to Rimini, Montana, after his high school graduation. Weston had once thought that a Rimini neighbor was using his television satellite dish to spy on his actions and believed Navy SEALs were hiding in his cornfield. Weston, who did not stand trial, was sent to a psychiatric unit at a federal prison in North Carolina.

October 3, 2013: Miriam Carey, 34, a Stamford, Connecticut dental hygienist who had been treated for postpartum depression, attempted at 2:13 p.m. to drive through a White House security checkpoint in her black Infiniti G37 coupe, striking a Secret Service agent in the process, and leading police on a chase to the Capitol, where she was fatally shot. Her 13-month-old daughter was discovered unharmed in the back seat of the vehicle after it had been stopped. Federal officials said she may have suffered from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and believed President Barack Obama was communicating with her.

April 11, 2015: Leo Thornton, 22, from Lincolnwood, Illinois, died by suicide when he killed himself on the Capitol grounds, with a single shot, causing the Capitol to go under lockdown. He was protesting taxation. Thornton’s parents said he had Asperger's syndrome. The suicide came during Washington's annual Cherry Blossom Festival.

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We have heard the name Antioch before.

Antioch, Tennessee is the site of a predicted theater incident that occurred on August 5, 2015, exactly two weeks after a shooting at a showing of Trainwreck in Lafayette, Louisiana. 

[Please recall that the Lafayette shooter shares the same middle name as the D.C. suspect. The Capitol gunmen is allegedly Larry Russell Dawson. Lafayette's was John Russell Houser.  Origin of the name Russell is from the transferred use of the surname derived from the Old French roussell (red-haired), from rous (red). The name, which arose as a nickname for someone with red hair, or even "little red one," was brought to England by the Normans.]

The Antioch hatchet attack and air pistol shooting resulted in the death of the attacker, Vincente David Montano, and the injury of three patrons of the theater.

The 2015 event took place at the Carmike Hickory 8 Cinema in Antioch, Tennessee, around 1:15 p.m. The gunman at the Hickory Hollow Cinema, Montano (above) was allegedly armed with a hatchet, pepper spray, an Airsoft gun, and a fake bomb. He reportedly was wearing a surgical mask. He was shot dead by a SWAT team as he exited through the theater's rear door.  The Carmike Hickory 8 Cinema and Hickory Hollow Cinema are references to Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson. See more here. 

The movie playing at the Carmike Hickory 8 Cinema was Mad Max: Fury Road. The Dark Knight Rises' Bane (Tom Hardy) plays Mad Max's Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy).

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Antioch is a community in southeast Nashville, Tennessee.

The community takes its name from Antioch, Turkey, an ancient city in Anatolia. As recently as the 1960s Antioch was a small community catering to the needs of area farmers with amenities such as a feed mill. Adjacent to Bakertown (a similar small community) it was located on the banks of Mill Creek, a minor tributary of the Cumberland River that rises near Nolensville, several miles to the southeast. This area has become less important over time as zoning restrictions forbidding further development on a floodplain have limited the construction of more businesses in this area, which had started to become congested.

Antioch on the Orontes was an ancient Greek city on the eastern side of the Orontes River. Its ruins lie near the modern city of Antakya, Turkey, and lends the modern city its name.

Founded near the end of the 4th century BC by Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander the Great's generals, Antioch's geographic, military and economic location, particularly the spice trade, the Silk Road, the Persian Royal Road, benefited its occupants, and eventually it rivaled Alexandria as the chief city of the Near East and as the main center of Hellenistic Judaism at the end of the Second Temple period. This and more historical notes can be found via the summary on Wikipedia.

Especially noteworthy is that Seleucus founded Antioch on a site chosen through ritual means. An eagle, the bird of Zeus, had been given a piece of sacrificial meat and the city was founded on the site to which the eagle carried the offering. Seleucus did this on the 22nd day of the month of Artemisios in the twelfth year of his reign (equivalent to May 300 BC). Antioch soon rose above Seleucia Pieria to become the Syrian capital.

Agrippa and Tiberius enlarged the theatre, and Trajan finished their work. Antoninus Pius paved the great east to west artery with granite. A circus, other colonnades and great numbers of baths were built, and new aqueducts to supply them bore the names of Caesars, the finest being the work of Hadrian. The Roman client, King Herod (most likely the great builder Herod the Great), erected a long stoa on the east, and Agrippa (c.63 BC – 12 BC) encouraged the growth of a new suburb south of this.

The Greek hippodrome was the basic model for both the Roman stadium and the Roman circus. It will be recalled that the term "stadium seating" comes from the Ancient Greek "circuses" (like Antioch) and evolved into theater seating (like in modern movie theaters and sports stadiums).

Correspondent Travis Vaughn made the observation that in 256, Antioch was suddenly raided by the Persians, who slew many in the theatre.

Outside Antioch, Greece, on October 22, 362, a mysterious fire destroyed the Temple of Apollo at Daphne.

There have been other modern incidents of violence at Antiochs. See here.

Thanks to Travis Vaughn and Robert Sullivan for various news items.