Ator lived in a metal shack that lacked electricity, plumbing, a floor and even furniture. The shack was on a piece of property he apparently owned on the far west side of Ector County. For electricity, he sometimes relied on generators. On cold nights, his neighbors said, he would sleep in his car with the motor running. His home is about 20 miles from downtown Odessa, on an unmarked caliche road off Kermit Highway and amid nodding pump jacks and property covered with sage, mesquite and huisache trees. Crime-scene tape still surrounded Ator’s property Monday. This is where many oil field workers live in the booming Permian Basin oil fields. It is the graceless side of the energy economy, a cluttered zone of mobile homes, oil tanks, service trucks, salvage yards and endless commercial metal buildings.Known to his closest neighbors as “El Loco,” the crazy one, Ator kept to himself. The nickname was partly a joke and partly an expression of community unease. “He had no communication with anyone. It was the way he acted. I thought, this person is not well,” said a neighbor who declined to be identified. “While he seemed to me to have an emotional problem, I never could have imagined him doing something like this.”Ator did not exchange greetings, did not have visitors at his home and spent a lot of time shooting his black rifle from a second-floor window into the field below. Neighbors sometimes heard loud rock music... “When we first moved in seven months ago, he struck us as something new, but we got used to him,” said Salet Holguin, 24, who lives nearby. “He wasn’t friendly. My husband told me that if he ever came over here, to not open the door.”... On the one occasion she felt threatened, when he paid her an angry visit armed with his black rifle, she called the Sheriff’s Office, but authorities could not find the location and did not arrive...“He scared me when he came over with that rifle, and all the children were around,” she said. She said she and her husband have six children...“The owner told me that when he first moved in, he had a wife and kids,” she said...They also said he no longer resembled the healthy, grinning man depicted in a 2001 police mug shot, from when he was arrested in Waco on charges of criminal trespass and evading arrest. He later failed a firearms background check and was prevented from buying a gun. It was unclear how he obtained the rifle he used Saturday. “He had longer hair, he was thin and he had teardrop tattoos on his face,” said Cesar Garcia, 29, who lives nearby.
The guy was in a spiral. His neighbors knew it. The local police knew it. God knows, somewhere amid the dark stalactites of his mind, he knew it, too. And one day, the spiral ended in that place where too many of those spirals end. We really ought to do something about that some day.
