Dead Gunman Held Police at Bay for Hours

TOPEKA, Kan. —  The gunman who killed a security officer and wounded four other people in a shooting and bombing rampage kept police at bay and hostages in hiding for several hours even after he was dead, an FBI official said Friday.

“They didn’t know they were being held hostage by a dead man,” FBI spokesman Jeff Lanza said.

Jack McKnight, scheduled to be sentenced to a lengthy jail term, fired bullets and lobbed explosive devices onto the fourth floor of the federal building on Thursday before accidentally blowing himself up.

A security guard, Gene Goldsberry, 61, was shot and killed and a male attorney seriously wounded when McKnight began firing after emerging from an elevator at the Frank Carlson federal building.

Witnesses told police that McKnight was tinkering with a bomb inside the court clerk’s office when it went off. The blast mangled McKnight’s body and seriously wounded three women with shrapnel and other debris.

Other people hiding on the fourth floor did not know McKnight was dead, and police did not discover his body or the injured women until about five hours later.

“We had to meticulously and methodically go through the building floor by floor. We had to work under the assumption he was alive and a possible danger,” Lanza said.

The heavily armed McKnight lobbed three or four “explosive devices” into the hallway, just as a car bomb he planted in the building’s parking lot exploded, Lanza said.

Facing a lengthy prison term, McKnight, 37, a convicted burglar, was probably seeking revenge on people in the court system, Lanza said.

“We don’t know who he was going after specifically, but he was probably targeting the court system. He was going to lose his freedom for a long time,” Lanza said.

McKnight pleaded guilty in May to possessing more than 100 marijuana plants and was scheduled to be sentenced Thursday from a minimum of 10 years and a maximum of 40 years in prison by federal Judge Sam Crow.