Cops: Md. Spree Shooter Had Been Stripped of Gun, Badge

The federal law enforcement officer accused of killing three people in a Maryland shooting spree was stripped of his badge and duty weapon in March after his wife sought a restraining order, authorities say. Gladys Tordil, 44, told the court that 62-year-old Eulalio Tordil had abused her for over a decade and subjected his stepdaughters to "intense-military-like discipline—push ups, detention in dark closets," the Washington Post reports. Investigators believe Tordil shot his estranged wife dead Thursday night outside a Beltsville, Md. high school while she was waiting to pick up her two daughters. He shot and wounded a bystander who tried to intervene, and then killed two people and injured two more, one of them critically, in apparently random shootings the next day, authorities say.

Tordil, a Homeland Security employee who has been a federal law enforcement officer since 1987, was arrested after police spotted him in a shopping plaza. They watched as he visited a Dunkin' Donuts, browsed a craft store, and had lunch at a Boston Market. Sources tell the Post that he planned to commit "suicide by cop," but was thwarted when up 100 officers surrounded him as soon as he left the restaurant. He has been charged with first-degree murder. Weirdly, the shopping plaza where he was arrested was the first place targeted by DC snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo in 2002. "They ate in the same restaurant where we were having the surveillance here today, which was an irony that was not lost on me," Montgomery County State's Attorney John McCarthy tells the AP. "I think it's a coincidence." (More Maryland stories.)