George Sodini: the 2009 Collier Township gym shooting and aftermath

On the evening of 4 August 2009, a gunman opened fire on a women's aerobics class at an LA Fitness club in Collier Township, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Three women were killed and nine other people were wounded. Police identified the gunman as George Sodini, 48, who shot himself at the scene. Because he died that night, there was no arrest, charge, trial or sentence. The legal consequences played out instead in civil courts and in public debate.

What happened at the club

The shooting took place at about 8.15pm in the LA Fitness club in the Great Southern Shopping Center, in the Kirwan Heights area of Collier Township, close to the borough of Bridgeville. The club is roughly 10 miles (16km) south of central Pittsburgh.

According to police accounts, the gunman went into a room where an evening class was under way, put a bag on the floor, switched off the lights and began firing with two 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistols. He then killed himself with a.45 Colt revolver. A third pistol, a.32-calibre semi-automatic, was found in his pocket and had not been used. Reports differed on the exact number of shots fired, so it is best described only as dozens.

The people who died

The Allegheny County Medical Examiner's office named the three women who died as Heidi Overmier, Elizabeth Gannon and Jody Billingsley. They were aged 46, 49 and 37 or 38 respectively, depending on the report. Nine other people were treated for injuries at hospitals in the area, and some remained in hospital for days afterwards. Funerals for two of the women were held on the Saturday after the shooting.

Who the gunman was

Sodini, born on 30 September 1960, lived in Scott Township and worked as a systems analyst at the law firm K&L Gates. After the shooting, investigators found writings and a website kept in his name. These described over several months his loneliness and his resentment towards women, and they referred to a plan to carry out an attack. Police also reported that a note expressing hatred of women was found in the bag he carried into the club.

Official findings have described his motive as rage and misogyny rooted in social rejection. Beyond what was recorded in his own writings and in police statements, there was no court hearing at which evidence could be tested, so no judicial finding was ever made on his state of mind.

Earlier contact with police

A week before the shooting, on 28 July 2009, a passenger on a Port Authority bus told police that a man had taken a grenade from a bag. Transit police staked out the route and, on 30 July, a sergeant stopped, questioned and searched Sodini because he matched the description. He denied the allegation. The passenger was shown a photograph but could not confirm he was the man, and no charges were brought. This only became public after the shooting.

No grenade was reported to have been found among his belongings, so officials said there was no way to be certain that he had been the man on the bus. The episode is often cited in discussions of how police handle reports that cannot be proved.

The weapons and the gun wholesaler

Reporting after the shooting showed that Sodini had bought an empty Glock magazine and a magazine-loading device from TGSCOM, an online firearms accessories dealer based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The same company had earlier supplied equipment to the gunmen in the 2007 Virginia Tech and 2008 Northern Illinois University shootings. TGSCOM later came under scrutiny from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other bodies, and it closed in 2012.

Why there was no criminal case

In the United States, a criminal prosecution cannot proceed against a person who has died. Allegheny County police, who led the investigation, therefore concluded their work without any court proceedings against the gunman. The facts were established through police statements, the medical examiner's findings and the material recovered from his home and from the club, rather than through a verdict.

Civil claims and his estate

The courts became involved through civil litigation. Within two weeks of the shooting, two of the injured women filed suit against Sodini's estate. Another wounded woman, Heather Sherba, who was shot twice, later settled a claim against both LA Fitness and the estate. A civil claim is a request for money damages and is decided on a lower standard of proof than a criminal charge, though settlements like this one are often agreed without a ruling on the facts.

It was also reported that Sodini left his estate, valued at about $225,000, to his alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh. The question of how such a bequest should be treated, given the claims of the victims, was a matter for the estate's legal process rather than for any criminal court.

Legacy

The Collier Township shooting is remembered locally as an attack on women in a place where they had gone to exercise, and by researchers as one of several US cases in which a gunman's online writings were later found to describe hostility towards women. The case also raised lasting questions about the sale of gun accessories online and about whether earlier warning signs could have been acted on. For the families of those killed and the people injured, the legal outcome was limited to civil claims; there was no trial at which the events were examined in open court.