Luby's shooting

• 1. Introduction

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  The Luby's shooting struck a crowded Texas cafeteria on the 16th of October 1991. At 12:39 in the afternoon, a blue 1987 Ford Ranger pickup truck smashed through the plate-glass front window of the Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen. It was Boss's Day, and around 150 people were inside, far more than usual. The driver was an unemployed 35-year-old man. Until the Virginia Tech shooting surpassed it in 2007, this was the deadliest mass shooting by a single perpetrator in modern U.S. history. Who were the people sitting at those tables? How did one diner's split-second decision open a path to safety for others? What had the gunman been saying and doing in the months and days before? And how did a single lunch hour end up changing the law in Texas?

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• 2. Inside the Cafeteria

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  The first person shot was Michael Griffith, a veterinarian, hit while the gunman was still sitting in the wrecked truck with a Glock 17 and a Ruger P89 in his hands. Then the man climbed out and began shouting. "All women of Killeen and Belton are vipers! This is what you've done to me and my family!" He added that this was what Bell County had done to him, and he called the day "payback day."

  He fired on patrons and staff with both pistols, then circled the room, choosing victims one at a time. Before shooting two of the women, he spat an insult at each of them. One woman had hidden beneath a bench near the serving line. He found her there and mocked her for hiding.

  Steve Ernst was lying under a table when the gunman reached him and shot him. Ernst rolled over, clutching his stomach. Nearby, a woman was holding a crying baby. The gunman barked at her, "You with the baby. Get out before I change my mind." She ran out with the child in her arms.

  After she left, he shot Ernst's wife in the arm. The bullet passed through her and killed her mother, Venice Ellen Henehan, who was 70. Toward the back of the room, beside a window that was still intact, a 28-year-old man was crouched on the floor.

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• 3. The Window

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  Tommy Vaughan was 28, and during a brief lull in the gunfire the shooter walked up to his table at the rear of the cafeteria. Vaughan was huddled on the floor beside the window. He threw himself through the glass, and the broken pane became an exit for everyone else.

  Dozens of people pushed, shoved, and knocked one another down in the rush to follow. By the time police arrived a few minutes later, a third of the people had gotten out.

  The gunman had reloaded at least three times by then. The officers engaged him in a brief shootout, and he was wounded. He backed into the area between the two bathrooms, where people were hiding inside with the doors blocked shut.

  Police ordered him again and again to surrender. He answered, "No, I'm going to kill more people." Officers shot him twice more, both times in the abdomen. One of his weapons had run out of ammunition, and his wounds were worsening. He shot himself in the head with his last bullet.

  He had fired about 80 times, and police had fired about 30. Only the gunman was struck by police bullets.

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• 4. Those Lost

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  Twenty-three people died, and another 27 were wounded. Ten of the dead were killed by single shots to the head at point blank range.

  The list of the dead reads like a cross-section of central Texas. Victims came from Killeen, Belton, Harker Heights, Marlin, Temple, Waco and Austin. Nine were listed with the hometown of Copperas Cove. One of them, Steven Dody, was a 43-year-old lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, and his listing also names Fort Hood.

  Some families lost more than one member. Alphonse and Ursula Gratia of Copperas Cove were 71 and 67. James and Lula Welsh, both 75, were both from Waco. Venice Henehan, the mother-in-law of Steve Ernst, listed Metz, Missouri as her hometown.

  Others were far younger. Sylvia King was 30, and Debra Gray was 33. The youngest name on the list belongs to John Romero Jr., who was 29.

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• 5. Path to Killeen

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  George Pierre Hennard was born on the 15th of October 1956 in Sayre, Pennsylvania, into a wealthy family. His father was a Swiss-born surgeon, and his mother was a homemaker. He had two younger siblings, a brother named Alan and a sister named Desiree.

  From the age of 5, he moved from city to city because his father worked at several army hospitals. The family finally settled in New Mexico, where his father took a post at the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces. Hennard graduated from Mayfield High School in 1974 and enlisted in the U.S. Navy. He served for three years and received an honorable discharge.

  A career as a merchant mariner followed, but it did not last. His parents divorced in 1983. His father moved to Houston, and his mother moved to Henderson, Nevada.

  Later, Hennard drifted between jobs, including construction crews in South Dakota and in Killeen. He spent part of each year living with his mother in Nevada. In Texas, he lived in a redbrick colonial home in Belton, which the family had bought in 1980, shortly after his father was hired at Fort Hood.

  In February 1991, at Mike's Gun House in Henderson, he bought the two 9mm pistols he would carry into the cafeteria, a Glock 17 and a Ruger P89.

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• 6. Grievances

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  On the 11th of May 1989, Hennard was discharged from the Merchant Marine for possession of marijuana and for racial incidents. That same month, his seaman papers were suspended after a racial argument with a shipmate.

  In 1990, he phoned Isaiah Williams, a port agent for the national maritime union in Wilmington, California. He wanted a letter of recommendation so he could regain his papers. Williams later said, "I don't recall having given him one." Hennard learned in mid-February that his bid for reinstatement had been denied. Several months later, he entered a drug-treatment program in Houston.

  People who knew him described a reclusive, belligerent man with an explosive temper. After the massacre, the Killeen police chief said that Hennard "had an evident problem with women for some reason." An ex-roommate was blunter. "He hated blacks, Hispanics, gays. He said women were snakes and always had derogatory remarks about them, especially after fights with his mother."

  Survivors said he had passed over men to shoot women. Fifteen of the 23 people he murdered, or 65 percent, were women, as were many of the wounded.

  His resentment also had a closer target. Two sisters, 23-year-old Jill Fritz and 19-year-old Jana Jemigan, lived two blocks from him. In June, he mailed them a five-page letter. In it he wrote, "You think the three of us can get together some day?" He also called himself "truly flattered knowing I have two teenage groupie fans."

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• 7. Warnings

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  About two months before the shooting, a clerk named Mary Mead was working at a convenience store in Belton when Hennard came in for breakfast. She later said he leaned over the counter and told her, "I want you to tell everybody, if they don't quit messing around my house, something awful is going to happen."

  He was also fixated on earlier killers. His particular fascination was James Huberty, who carried out the San Ysidro McDonald's massacre in 1984. Reportedly, Hennard studied that attack at length.

  A week and a half before the shooting, he picked up his paycheck at a concrete company in Copperas Cove and announced that he was quitting. He wondered aloud what would happen if he killed someone. Coworker Bubba Hawkins recalled him talking about certain women in Belton who had given him problems. "And he kept saying, 'Watch and see, watch and see'."

  On his 35th birthday, the 15th of October 1991, he spoke with his mother by phone. That evening, he was eating a cheeseburger and french fries at a diner outside Belton while television covered the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas. When an interview with Anita Hill appeared on screen, manager Bill Stringer said, "he just went off." The cafeteria attack came the following afternoon.

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• 8. Law and Memory

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  The U.S. House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on an anticrime bill the day after the massacre. Some of the victims had lived in the district of Rep. Chet Edwards. In response, he dropped his opposition to a gun control provision in the bill. That provision would have banned some weapons and magazines like one the gunman used, and it did not pass.

  Prayer vigils were held in the community. Families of the dead, survivors, and police officers received counseling for grief, shock, and stress.

  The Texas State Rifle Association and others wanted the state to let citizens carry concealed weapons. Democratic Governor Ann Richards vetoed such bills. In 1995, her Republican successor, George W. Bush, signed one into law.

  Suzanna Hupp had campaigned for that law. She had been in the cafeteria that day, and both of her parents, Alphonse "Al" Gratia and Ursula "Suzy" Gratia, were killed. Hupp testified that she had left her .38 revolver in her car, saying, "It was a hundred feet away in my car." She had feared she could lose her chiropractor's license if she were caught carrying it. Hupp testified across the country in support of concealed handgun laws, and she was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1996.

  A pink granite memorial stands behind the Killeen Community Center, carved with the date and the names of those killed. The cafeteria itself reopened five months after the massacre and closed permanently on the 8th of September 2000. By 2006, a buffet called Yank Sing occupied the former cafeteria, and it was still open as of May 2026.

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