THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 1, 1995 TAG: 9501010109
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 124 lines
John C. Salvi III was a wrestler, weight lifter and art student during his high school years in Naples, Fla. Although quiet and somewhat aloof, Salvi is remembered as someone who blended in, had friends and went to parties - not as someone with strident anti-abortion beliefs.
But Salvi also had a temper that erupted occasionally into outbursts and fights that friends and a former employer remember. His personality showed a bizarre disintegration during the two years after his graduation in 1990 from Naples High School.
Salvi's strange behavior eventually cost him his job with a building maintenance company in Naples. On his last day at work, Salvi dropped his pants in front of a woman while he cleaned gutters on the roof of a house, according to his former employers.
And two years ago, just before he moved from Florida to New Hampshire, Salvi modified the .22-caliber Ruger rifle that he bought from Mark Roberts, his former employer.. Salvi hacked off its barrel, cut down the stock and added a banana clip to hold more bullets.
``He told me he needed it that way when he went into the woods to shoot,'' said Roberts, owner of Roberts Building Maintenance in Naples. He said he sold Salvi the gun for $100 in 1992.
Roberts sold Salvi the weapon before he began acting strangely and because Roberts knew Salvi's family and felt certain the gun would not be misused.
``But his personality just changed over that two-year time frame,'' Roberts said by phone Saturday. ``He was a good worker, but toward the last couple of months we got into problems.''
Roberts said he avoided actually firing Salvi ``because although Salvi was mostly mild and meek, he was the kind of guy that if he lost his temper he was not controlled.''
Instead, Roberts told Salvi that `` `I have run out of work and I don't need you anymore.' I felt that was the best way to handle it.''
Roberts also saw Salvi explode in front of his parents.
``He was basically throwing things around and shouting,'' Roberts remembered.
Roberts said Salvi was very concerned about his appearance and worked out to keep in shape, something he apparently had started as a member of the wrestling team at Naples High School. His weight appeared to be greatly affected by his workouts, Roberts said, varying from 145 pounds to 200 pounds. The great variation, Roberts said, caused him to suspect that Salvi was using steroids.
``He even told me that they had given him some drugs at the gym,'' Roberts said.
Roberts saw Salvi for the last time just before Christmas 1992. As Salvi got ready to move to a house in New England that his parents had inherited, he showed Roberts the gun.
``I told him I thought he should get rid of it, that it was probably against the law,'' Roberts said. ``He told me he was going to get rid of it.''
Salvi's strange behavior continued in New Hampshire, when he first began showing signs of anti-abortion fervor, and his career plans changed dramatically. After training to be a fireman in Florida while working for Roberts, Salvi began training to be a hairdresser in New Hampshire.
He was about to be fired from the salon where he trained, said employees quoted in The Eagle-Tribune in North Andover, Mass.
The firing stemmed from a dispute Salvi had with a customer. Company policy required employees to hang up customers' coats. Apparently, the customer did not want his coat hung up, employees said.
The owner of Eccentric Hair Salon, Richard Griffin, who hired Salvi a few months ago, said Salvi was having problems relating to customers because he was quiet and introverted.
``He was very quiet, and I always tried to get him to talk because you have to in our line of business,'' Griffin said. ``When he did, he quoted Scriptures constantly.''
Griffin said Salvi, who was a student at Portsmouth Beauty School in Portsmouth, N.H., had a picture of a fetus on his truck. The picture upset the women working at the salon, and Griffin asked him to remove it, he said.
``We had to force him to take it off. It was ugly,'' Griffin said. ``Salvi was very much a loner.'' Griffin said he didn't think Salvi was connected with any anti-abortion organizations.
Salvi is an only child and had moved with his parents to Florida about 10 years ago.
His parents came to celebrate Christmas at an uncle's home in Ipswich and had been staying with Salvi in his apartment in Hampton, N.H.
``I don't believe it,'' the uncle, Dennis Trudel, told The Eagle-Tribune. ``I don't believe it. It shocks me in the same way it shocks everybody else. He was quiet, but I never saw anything like this in him.''
Jeff Marshall, 19, who lived near Salvi in Hampton, said he spent some time with him. Salvi was spotted at his apartment house a couple of hours after the two abortion clinic workers were killed Friday in Brookline, Mass.
Marshall said he remembered one particularly odd thing about Salvi. He had an ocean view, but blocked it.
``He had the curtains on his slider closed and his bureau pushed up against it. He covered up his ocean view with a bureau and shelves,'' Marshall said.
That's a very different John Salvi from the one whom high school friend Erik Kellar remembers at their graduation in 1990.
``He was always very nice to me,'' Kellar said by phone. He attended English and art classes with Salvi. ``He was not the radical person I saw on the news tonight.''
The only violent outburst Kellar remembers seeing from Salvi was during a party that Salvi threw at his parents' home in Naples.
``Somebody was fighting, and he broke it up and told them to get out,'' Kellar remembered. ``But he was only protecting his house. He was really a good kid.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photos
STEVE MYERS
John C. Salvi III, 22, is taken away by authorities in Norfolk on
Saturday.
Photo
As a teenager in Naples, Fla., John C. Salvi III fit in. Yet he was
prone to violent outbursts and, later, strange behavior, friends
say.
Map
KEN WRIGHT/Staff
KEY SITES
KEYWORDS: ABORTION CLINICS ANTI-ABORTION SHOOTING ARREST by CNB