Interviews with victims detail horror of concert shootings
Attendees helped Gale climb wall at Alrosa before his rampage
Thursday, October 20, 2005
John Futty
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
From the archive
The Alrosa Villa Shootings
Articles, photos and video from The Columbus Dispatch and WBNS-10TV

Columbus Police Officer James Niggemeyer used a shotgun to end last year’s attack at the Alrosa Villa.

Bleeding from three bullet wounds and pinned beneath a gunman on the Alrosa Villa stage, John Brooks never saw or heard the shotgun blast that saved his life.

Brooks was among seven people shot by Nathan Gale after Gale stormed the stage of the North Side nightclub with a 9 mm handgun during a Damageplan concert Dec. 8.

As four of the victims lay dying, Brooks became a hostage, held in Gale’s grip while concertgoers fled and Columbus police moved in.

"Don’t move, don’t move," Gale told Brooks, pressing his knees into Brooks’ back and holding the gun to his head.

Brooks told police he never saw Officer James Niggemeyer enter the rear stage door with a shotgun and kill Gale with a single shot to the head from 20 feet away.

"Brooks thought the gunman was going to shoot him in the head and then all of a sudden the gunman just let him go," according to a detective’s interview with Brooks, who scrambled off the stage when Gale fell.

The interview summary is included in a 627-page investigative file on the case released yesterday by police in response to a public-records request by The Dispatch.

The division’s Firearms Board of Inquiry reviewed the investigation and determined that Niggemeyer’s actions were justified.

Supervisors agreed that the officer acted within division policy.

The documents — including summaries of 287 interviews with concertgoers, band members, club employees, police officers and paramedics — fail to clear up confusion surrounding the order in which victims were shot or explain the motives of the 25-year-old Marysville man responsible for the carnage.

Witnesses agreed that Gale produced the gun when he stepped on stage and that his first target was "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, Damageplan’s 38-year-old lead guitarist, who died of three gunshot wounds to the head.

But the band’s tour manager, Christopher Paluska, 39, told police he was shot first when he tried to stop Gale from entering the stage.

"Mr. Paluska related he grabbed the guy and this individual turned around and shot him," detectives reported. "After doing this, Mr. Paluska ran to the side of the stage where someone helped him lie down and he watched as Dimebag Darrell Abbott . . . got shot by the shooter."

Paluska and Brooks, among three survivors of the shootings, did not return phone calls from The Dispatch yesterday.

Brooks, a 34-year-old stage technician for the band, was standing behind speakers on the right side of the stage when Gale advanced on Abbott from the other side of the stage.

He said Gale shot Abbott, then shot the band’s security chief, Jeffrey "Mayhem" Thompson, as they rushed to help the guitarist.

Thompson died of three gunshot wounds.

The others who died trying to intervene were Nathan Bray, a 23-year-old concertgoer from Grove City who was shot once in the chest, and Erin Halk, a 29-yearold club employee from Columbus who was shot six times.

Brooks was shot in the right hand, right thigh and right side as he wrestled with the gunman. He said he remembers Gale shooting someone else as they grappled.

The other surviving victim, concertgoer Travis Burnett, of Gahanna, said he jumped on stage during the struggle and confronted Gale, who looked up and said, "Get the ---- out of here." Burnett said he tried to put Gale in "a wristlock," but the gun went off and a bullet grazed Burnett’s left forearm.

Burnett fled as "he heard three more gunshots that he believed were aimed at his head."

The band members saw little other than the guitarist being shot.

Bass player Robert Kakaha said "he looked over toward Dimebag and the suspect looked like he was hugging him, then turned to the side and that’s when he saw the gun aimed at his head." Kakaha ran out the club’s back door.

Dimebag’s brother, drummer Vincent "Vinnie Paul" Abbott, told investigators that he hid behind some amplifiers after his brother was shot. John Graham, a crew member, jumped on the drummer to protect him, then told him to run out the back door when Gale was reloading his gun.

The gunman walked behind lead singer Patrick Lachman, who didn’t realize what was happening until he heard the gunshots.

Lachman jumped off the stage, still holding the microphone, and yelled for someone to call 911.

Gale entered the club as Damageplan began its first song. He had scaled a wooden privacy fence that surrounds the club’s outdoor patio.

Allison Henthorn, a concertgoer from Centerburg, told investigators she watched three people on the patio encourage the intruder.

"They were basically saying, ‘Come on, right on,’ or whatever," she told The Dispatch yesterday. "He got about halfway over the fence and they helped him the rest of the way."

A security guard on the patio approached Gale about entering the club without buying an $8 ticket, saying, "No way, no way," she recalled. Gale "said, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ and walked by him into the club."

Henthorn and the security guard followed Gale, who quickly outpaced them on his way to the stage.

Gale’s mother, Mary Clark, told investigators her son’s paranoid schizophrenia was diagnosed before he was discharged from the Marines and that he had stopped taking his medication.

"In 1999 to 2000, Mr. Gale started telling Mrs. Clark ‘they were after him’ and he felt there were surveillance cameras placed inside the house and he also started hearing voices," the report states.

Officers who searched Gale’s Marysville apartment found no "computers or magazines or compact discs" related to Damageplan or Pantera, the Abbott brothers’ previous band.

However, a compact-disc player found inside the Pontiac Grand Am that Gale drove to the concert contained a Damageplan CD.

Several witnesses, including band and crew members, suggested that the shootings might have been motivated by the breakup of Pantera or a public dispute between Dimebag Darrell and Pantera’s lead singer, Phil Anselmo.

Investigators dismissed the theory.

"At this point," wrote detective William Gillette, "there is no evidence leading detectives to believe Nathan Gale was communicating with Phil Anselmo or any other individual . . . in an effort to hurt Dimebag Darrell Abbott."

Among those who were baffled by Gale’s motives was the man he wrestled to the ground and held hostage until an officer’s shot ended the ordeal.

"Brooks said he kept asking the gunman why he was doing this and to please stop," investigators wrote. "Brooks said he just couldn’t imagine why this guy kept doing this."

Gale’s mother, Mary Clark, told investigators her son’s paranoid schizophrenia was diagnosed before he was discharged from the Marines and that he had stopped taking his medication.

"In 1999 to 2000, Mr. Gale started telling Mrs. Clark ‘they were after him’ and he felt there were surveillance cameras placed inside the house and he also started hearing voices," the report states

ALROSA VILLA: ONE YEAR LATER
ECHOES OF HORROR
Fallout still settling from deadly shooting at Columbus club
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Aaron Beck and John Futty
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Shortly after 10 p.m. on Dec. 8, 2004, Nathan Gale of Marysville climbed a security fence outside the Alrosa Villa nightclub.

The Texas heavy-metal band Damageplan had just begun playing its first song, Breathing New Life.

Gale, 25, entered a side door, made his way through the crowd, walked around a stack of amplifiers and onto the stage, where he pulled out a handgun.

Within three minutes, five people were dead or dying, including guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott, Damageplan crew member Jeffrey Thompson, club security guard Erin Halk, audience member Nathan Bray and Gale, shot by a police officer.

Two other Damageplan crew members, Christopher Paluska and John Brooks, and an audience member, Travis Burnett, were wounded.

A year later, echoes of the shootings can still be heard, from the nightclub to the state legislature and from Columbus to Texas.

• The club. The graffiti honoring Abbott has been washed off the side of Alrosa Villa and the boulder that served as a makeshift memorial is largely free of the tributes.

But the shooting’s legacy is very real at the North Side club.

Since the shootings, booking agents and a few bands have all but blacklisted the 31-year-old venue. This year, the club hosted eight national acts, compared with 20 to 25 a year before the shooting.

"We’ve lost a tremendous amount of money, not because of Columbus customers, but because bands won’t play here," club owner Rick Cautela said. "And no band from Texas wants to play here."

The Houston band King’s X, which played Nov. 12, was an exception, even though the band’s singer, Doug Pinnick, was close to Abbott.

"Everybody didn’t think about it at all until they got on stage and then it was really weird," said King’s X road manager Jay Phebus. "But I mean, what are we going to do? Not play every place Dime played?"

• The band. The surviving members of Damageplan returned to Texas after the shooting and have played together only once since.

Bassist Robert "Bob Zilla" Kakaha doesn’t know if the band still exists.

"You’ll have to ask Vinnie that one," he said recently, referring to drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott, Darrell Abbott’s brother.

Kakaha did say he plans to perform with Abbott and Damageplan singer Patrick Lachman on New Year’s Eve in the band’s home base of Arlington, Texas.

Lachman has formed a new band in San Francisco.

Since the shooting, Vinnie Paul Abbott has granted only one major interview — to Guitar World magazine, which had published a column by his brother. Throughout the year, bands and musicians paid tribute to Darrell Abbott from concert stages. On Saturday in Fort Worth, Texas, nine heavy-metal bands will perform during "Dimefest."

Proceeds will go to the Dimebag Darrell Memorial Fund to cover medical and other costs of former Damageplan crew mates Brooks, Thompson and Paluska.

• The officer. Columbus Police Officer James Niggemeyer won’t be on duty tonight.

He decided several weeks ago that he didn’t want to work on the first anniversary of the carnage at Alrosa Villa, which he ended by shooting gunman Gale.

"I didn’t think my mind would be there," he said yesterday. "I’ll just take the night off and relax."

One year later, Niggemeyer still wishes it could have ended some other way. But he remains convinced he made the right choice when he killed Gale.

A Franklin County grand jury cleared the officer, and a police review board ruled that he acted properly. Witnesses hailed him as a hero whose quick action saved lives. Awards and accolades rolled in.

The 32-year-old officer continues to work the night shift out of the same substation at Karl and Morse roads.

The trauma of that night lingers.

"It’s still fresh," he said. "It’s still something that’s on your mind all the time."

• The shooter. A year later, Gale’s motive remains a mystery. Even a recently released 627-page police investigation contained few clues about what drove the Marysville man to such a rampage.

Gale’s mother told investigators that her son was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2003 and may not have been taking medication.

Some estranged friends said Gale once told them that Pantera, the Abbott brothers’ previous band, had stolen lyrics from him, but investigators found nothing about the bands in a search of Gale’s apartment.

Police also confirmed that Gale caused a disturbance on stage during a Damageplan concert in Cincinnati eight months before the shootings at Alrosa.

But Bo Toler, the owner of a Marysville tattoo parlor, who spoke to an agitated Gale just hours before the shootings, said Gale expressed no interest in the Abbotts’ bands.

"Gale never talked about the group Pantera or Dimebag Darrell Abbott or going to any concert," Toler told investigators, and Gale "never mentioned anything that day about going to a concert later that evening."

• The crackdown. Columbus officials have backed away from efforts to keep unaccompanied minors out of Alrosa Villa and other nightspots.

A few months after the shootings, police charged Alrosa Villa and the Newport Music Hall with violating an obscure state law prohibiting "public dance halls" from admitting minors without a parent or legal guardian.

But the city attorney’s office conceded that the 80-year-old statute, also found in the city code, was outdated and difficult to enforce.

This fall, the city dismissed the charges and allowed the club owners to essentially pay a fine without entering a plea, said City Prosecutor Steve McIntosh.

State Rep. Larry Wolpert, a Hilliard Republican, is co-sponsoring legislation that would eliminate the dance-hall law.