Neighbors Always Say the Same Thing 

Several days later, people are still trying to come to grips with the horrible shooting at a church service in Brookfield. When police and the media talked with his neighbors, they said what they always say:

"He was the quietest guy in the world, the nicest," said Robert Blasczyk, another resident of Ratzmann's modest New Berlin neighborhood. ". . . I would have never believed this in a million years."

Ratzmann, according to Colwell, who talked with him regularly, was a devout churchgoer, an avid gardener and an ingenious tinkerer.

He "just never came off as a person with any kind of an aggressive attitude," Colwell said. "So calm and so mellow of a person, you know. Not somebody with a huge sense of humor but not somebody who was down and dark."

These are the sorts of things neighbors always say. He was polite, always said hello, kept to himself. I would never imagine he could do something so terrible. I'm not trying make a joke out of this. I honestly think this is a coping mechanism. When someone does something so heinous, so horrible, so unthinkable... who wants to admit that this person lived next door to them? I think neighbors would much rather pretend that the person they knew was someone besides the killer they found out he was.

Was there something I missed? Was there was a warning sign... something I could have done, or someone I could have called to prevent this? I'm not saying there was in this case, but you can bet that the neighbors are quietly thinking just that. They're going over every conversation they had, every noise they heard. It makes you think about the person who lives next door to you that you never think about, because they're always so quiet. It's a scary thought, and a quiet sort of torture for the people who knew that man.

And after such a seemingly random, thoughtless horrible act, we have this woman using it as an excuse:

A woman intentionally rammed her car into St. Joseph's Catholic Church on Saturday, saying the deadly Brookfield shootings prove God does not exist, police Sgt. Jeff Fulwiler said Monday.

The woman was distraught over the shooting deaths of seven people earlier that day during a church service at the Sheraton hotel in Brookfield, he said. The gunman, Terry Ratzmann, 44, turned the gun on himself and also died.

She didn't know the victims.

So you think that because one person did a horrible, stupid, senseless thing, you have an excuse to do a stupid, senseless thing? Yeah... quite a tribute you put together there.