Irv, a retired steelworker and lifelong gun enthusiast, had been collecting firearms since his early twenties and was purported to have one of the five most valuable collections in the state.
Neighbors later remarked that the atmosphere in the house was as pleasant as you could hope for, though a few did notice that Andy — the youngest of the four Leonard children and the only one still living at home — seemed a bit “distracted.”
Around 8:45 that evening, Russell Brennert, a friend of Andy’s from Cedar Hill High School, came by after getting off work from his part-time job. Witnesses described Andy as being “abrupt” with Russell, as if he didn’t want him to be there. Some speculated that the two might have had an argument recently that Andy was still sore about. In any case, Andy excused himself and went upstairs to “check on something.”
Russell started to leave, but Miriam insisted he fix himself a sandwich first. A few minutes later, Andy — apparently no longer upset — reappeared and asked if Russell would mind driving Mary Alice Hubert, Miriam’s mother and Andy’s grandmother, back to her house. The seventy-three-year-old Mrs. Hubert, a widow of ten years, was still recovering from a mild heart attack in December and had forgotten to bring her medication. Brennert offered to take Mary Alice’s house key and drive over by himself for the medicine, but Andy insisted Mrs. Hubert go along.
“I thought it seemed kind of odd,” said Bill Gardner, a neighbor who was present at the time, “Andy being so bound and determined to get the two of them out of there before the fireworks started. Poor Miriam didn’t know what to make of it all. I mean, I didn’t think it was any of my business, but somebody should’ve said something about it. Andy started getting outright rude. If he’d been my kid, I’d’ve snatched him bald-headed, acting that way. And after his mom’d gone to all that fuss to make everything so nice.”
Mrs. Hubert prevented things from getting out of hand by saying it would be best if she went with Russell; after all, she was an “old broad,” set in her ways, and everything in an old broad’s house had to be just so... besides, there were so many medicine containers in her cabinet, Russell might just “bust his brain right open” trying to figure out which was the right one.
As the two were on their way out, Andy stopped them at the door to give Mrs. Hubert a hug.
According to her, Andy seemed “really sorry about something. He’s a strong boy, an athlete, and I don’t care what anyone says, he should’ve got that scholarship. Okay, maybe he wasn’t as bright as some kids, but he was a fine athlete, and them college people should’ve let that count for something. It was terrible, listening to him talk about how he was maybe gonna have to go to work at the factory to earn his college money... everybody knows where that leads. I’m sorry, I got off the track, didn’t I? You asked about him hugging me when we left that night... well, he was always real careful when he hugged me never to squeeze too hard — these old bones can’t take it... but when he hugged me then, I thought he was going to break my ribs. I just figured it was on account he felt bad about the argument. I didn’t mean to create such a bother, I thought I had the medicine with me, but I... forget things sometimes.
“He kissed me on the cheek and said ‘Bye, Grandma. I love you.’ It wasn’t so much the words, he always said that same thing to me every time I left... it was the way he said them. I remember thinking he was going to cry, that’s how those words sounded, so I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Your mom knows you didn’t mean to be so surly.’ I told him that when I got back, we’d watch the rest of the fireworks and then make some popcorn and maybe see a movie on the TV. He used to like doing that with me when he was littler.
“He smiled and touched my cheek with two of his fingers — he’d never done that before — and he looked at Russ like maybe he wanted to give him a hug, too, but boys that age don’t hug each other, they think it makes them look like queers or something, but I could see it in Andy’s eyes that he wanted to hug Russ.
“Then he said the strangest thing. He looked at Russ and kind of... slapped the side of Russ’s shoulder — friendly, you know, like men’ll do with each other when they feel too silly to hug? Anyway, he, uh, did that shoulder thing, then looked at Russ and said, ‘The end is courage.’ I figured it was a line from some movie they’d seen together. They love their movies, those two, always quoting lines to each other like some kind of secret code — like in Citizen Kane with ‘Rosebud.’ That kind of thing.
“It wasn’t until we were almost to my house that Russ asked me if I knew what the heck Andy meant when he said that.
“I knew right then that something was wrong, terribly wrong. Oh Lord, when I think of it now... the... the pain a soul would have to be in to do something... like that...”
Russell Brennert and Mary Alice Hubert left the Leonard house at 9:05. As soon as he saw Brennert’s car turn the corner at the end of the street, Andy immediately went back upstairs and did not come down until the locally sponsored Kiwanis Club fireworks display began at 9:15.
Several factors contributed to the neighbors’ initial failure to react to what happened. First, there was the thunderous noise of the fireworks themselves. Since White’s Field, the site of the fireworks display, was less than one mile away, the resounding boom of the cannons was, as one person described, “damn near loud enough to rupture your eardrums.”
Second, music from a pair of concert hall speakers that Bill Gardner had set up in his front yard compounded the glass-rattling noise and vibrations of the cannons. “Every Fourth of July,” said Gardner, “WLCB [a local low-wattage FM radio station] plays music to go along with the fireworks. You know, ‘America the Beautiful,’ ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ Charlie Daniels’s ‘In America,’ stuff like that, and every year I tune ’em in and set my speakers out and let fly. Folks on this street want me to do it, they all like it.”
“How the fuck was I supposed to know Andy was gonna flip out?”
Third and last, there were innumerable firecrackers being set off by neighborhood children. This not only added to the general racket but also accounted for the neighbors’ ignoring certain visual clues once Andy moved outside. “You have to understand,” said one detective, “that everywhere around these people, up and down the street, kids were setting off all different kinds of things: firecrackers, sparklers, bottle rockets, M-80s, for God’s sake! Is it any wonder it took them so long to tell the difference between an exploding firecracker and the muzzle flash from a gun?”
“Andy Leonard had to’ve been planning this for a long time. He knew there’d be noise and explosions and lights and a hundred other things to distract everyone from what he was doing.”
At exactly 9:15 P.M., Andy Leonard walked calmly downstairs carrying three semiautomatic pistols — a Walther P .38 9mm Perabellum, a Mauser Luger 7.65mm, and a Coonan .357 Magnum — as well as an HK53 5.56mm assault rifle, all of which he’d taken from his father’s massive oak gun cabinet upstairs.
Of the thirteen other family members present at that time, five — including Irv Leonard, sixty-two, and his oldest son, Chet, twenty-five — were outside watching the fireworks. Andy’s two older sisters, Jessica, twenty-nine, and Elizabeth, thirty-four (both of whose husbands were also outside), were in the kitchen hurriedly helping their mother put away the buffet leftovers so they could join the men on the front lawn.
Jessica’s three children — Randy, age seven; Theresa, four; and Joseph, nine and a half months — were in the living room. Randy and his sister had just finished changing their baby brother’s diaper and were strapping him into his safety seat so they could hurry up and get outside. Joseph thought they were playing with him and so thrashed and giggled a lot.