At the start of his hours-long rampage, Rodrick Shonte Dantzler tracked down his daughter and her mother and killed them, along with the mother's own parents. He then went to a different house and killed another former girlfriend, plus her sister and 10-year-old niece.
Dantzler "went out hunting" his victims, Grand Rapids Police Chief Kevin Belk said. He said the gunman used cocaine and alcohol on the day of the slayings.
The 34-year-old former prison inmate began the spree Thursday afternoon before leading police on a high-speed chase through downtown Grand Rapids. He crashed his car and took several hostages in a stranger's home, then killed himself with a shot to the head late that night.
Investigators did not know what triggered the attack, but the police chief said Dantzler appeared to be "mentally unstable."
"I don't have a clinical diagnosis," Belk said. "Clearly he was a very troubled individual."
Records show Dantzler was sentenced in 2000 to three- to 10-years in state prison for assault with intent to do great bodily harm less than murder. He was paroled in May 2003 and discharged from parole in May 2005. A spokesman for the prison system said Dantzler had not been under state supervision since then.
After getting a 911 call that a man had acknowledged killing several people, police went to Dantzler's home, but he wasn't there.
Authorities soon got a call from a woman who said her relatives had been shot. Next came a call about someone finding four gunshot victims at another house.
Officers found three bodies in a home on Plainfield Avenue. An hour later, they discovered the other four across town in a house on a cul-de-sac called Brynell Court.
"It makes no sense to try to rationalize it, what the motives were," Belk said. "You just cannot come up with a logical reason why someone takes seven peoples' lives."
While police were investigating the slayings, Belk said, officers received a report of a "road rage" shooting.
Dantzler had apparently shot at a man through the rear window of the vehicle he was driving. Police spotted him, and began a chase that included Dantzler crashing into a patrol car downtown and exchanging gunfire with officers. A female bystander was shot in the shoulder.
Karissa Swanson, 18, said her mother was the woman who was shot, and that she had known Dantzler for many years.
Swanson said her mother, 35-year-old April Swanson, was driving and chatting on her cellphone when Dantzler suddenly pulled up beside her.
"My mom turned her head and he was right there, yelling her name, like, `April, April, I gotta talk, I gotta talk to you,"' Swanson said. "So my mom hung up the phone and called the police and was like, `He's right next to me."'
The daughter said Dantzler chased her mother until they got caught at a stoplight, when he shot at her car.
Pickup driver Robert Poore, who also was shot during the chase, told police that the bullet ricocheted off a titanium plate that had been inserted in his nose during cancer treatment when he was a child, according to WOOD-TV. Poore suffered only minor injuries.
Dantzler drove a sport utility vehicle north from downtown and onto Interstate 96, crossing a grassy median and heading the wrong way down the highway while more than a dozen squad cars pursued him.
He eventually crashed the vehicle while driving down an embankment into a wooded area.
Dantzler then made his way toward a nearby home, firing several shots as he forced his way inside and took hostages he did not know, police said. Dozens of officers with guns drawn cordoned off the neighborhood in the northern part of the city.
That was around 7:30 p.m. Over the next five hours, Dantzler alternately threatened to shoot the hostages and pleaded with police to take him out, even asking negotiators whether there were snipers outside the home and where he should stand. He sometimes fired his gun at officers and inside the home, Belk said.
Belk said police weren't aware there was a third person in the house until the first hostage came out and informed them. He said she was a house-sitter who was about to leave when Dantzler burst in and she hid in a closet. She came out when Dantzler became agitated because the man inside was hard of hearing and they were having trouble communicating.
"She placed herself in more harm by exposing herself," Belk said.
He said the police actually used the hostages as go-betweens to talk to the gunman, and that after the hostages were released Thursday night they were doing "amazingly well."
"But no doubt as with anything when the incident settles down, no doubt they're going to be a lot more traumatized today I think perhaps than during the event," Belk said.
Authorities identified the dead as: 29-year-old Jennifer Marie Heeren, an ex-girlfriend; 12-year-old Kamrie Deann Heeren-Dantzler, Dantzler's daughter; 52-year-old Rebecca Lynn Heeren, Jennifer Heeren's mother; 51-year-old Thomas Heeren, her father; 23-year-old Kimberlee Ann Emkens, a woman Dantzler had previously dated; 27-year-old Amanda Renee Emkens, Kimberlee Emkens' sister; and 10-year-old Marissa Lynn Emkens, Amanda Emkens' daughter.
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Associated Press writers Kathy Barks Hoffman in Grand Rapids, and Corey Williams, Jeff Karoub and David N. Goodman in Detroit contributed to this report.
