The naked guy who shot up the Nashville Waffle House thought Taylor Swift was stalking him

April 23, 2018 Alan Cross 0 Comments 1 min read

As I write this, there’s a manhunt on for Travis Reinking, the guy who allegedly walked into a Nashville Waffle House restaurant at around 3:30 am Sunday and opened fire with an AR-15. He was wearing nothing but a jacket.

After shooting several people (four are now dead), he was disarmed by one of the customers and then ran out. He put on a pair of pants and disappeared.

Something with Reinking obviously wasn’t right. After running into trouble with the police–in 2016, he breached a White House security barrier in an attempt to meet Donald Trump–he had some firearms confiscated. Those guns were then returned to his father, who apparently promised to keep them away from his son. For some reason, though, he returned them to his son.

Reinking also had a history of delusions. According to CNN:

“Travis is hostile toward police and does not recognize police authority. Travis also possesses several firearms,” an officer said in a May 2016 incident report. At the time, Reinking’s parents had called emergency services to report their son believed pop star Taylor Swift was stalking him, and he had made comments about killing himself.

[…]

On August 24, the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Office seized four firearms and ammunition from Reinking’s apartment along with his state firearm owners identification, according to an incident report. The seizure came less than two weeks after a Tazewell County sergeant said that Reinking drove up to his squad car and asked about filing a report.

Reinking told the sergeant that people were “tapping into his computer and phone” and barking like dogs outside his home, according to an August 11 incident report. He said he felt like he was being watched and that people were baiting him into breaking the law, the report states. He told the officer that it all started after he began writing to Taylor Swift, according to the report.

The whole story can be found here.