Authorities identified the troubled lawyer, who opened fire on morning commuters in Houston on Monday as a man of Indian-origin with Nazi sympathies.
Nathan Desai was wearing military-style clothing with Nazi symbols during the 20-minute shooting spree when he fired at passing cars and injured nine people before being fatally shot himself.
Police said that they did not know why Desai went on the rampage hitting people randomly.
Desai’s name was written with the ‘s’ capitalised in media reports in Houston, making it sound European, but his father was identified as Prakash Desai.
All of his victims survived but one person was critically wounded and five others were hospitalised, Houston’s Acting Police Chief Martha Montalvo said.
She described the shooter as a lawyer, who was having problems at his law firm. When police responded to the shooting, he shot at them and was killed when police returned fire, Montalvo said.
The shooter’s father, 80-year-old Prakash Desai told KPRC TV that his son was “worried” because his law practice was not doing so well.
Forty-six-year-old Desai owned several guns to protect himself against his clients, some of whom were “funny people and criminal-minded people”, his father said.
Houston Chronicle reported that police found in his flat several military items that went back to the Civil War.
Police found a Thompson submachine gun in his Porche and a 0.45 caliber handgun that he had used against police.
The Chronicle said that police used a robot to examine his car and his flat for explosives.
This is the second mass shooting by a person of Indian descent in the US.
In 2003, at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Biswanath Halder went on the rampage, taking hostages, killing a graduate student and wounding another and a professor.
(With inputs from IANS)
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