To his friends, Jason Dalton was always a friendly fella.
Everyone said he would never hurt a fly.
He had no history of violence.
He had no recorded mental issues.
He was a married man with two kids who loved him dearly.
And then, one day something snapped.
A mad man was on the loose, controlled, no less, by the devil himself.
As crazy as that sounds, it’s what Dalton said after he’d shot and killed people he’d
never seen before in his life.
In just about all cases involving serial or rampage killers, there are early signs they
will lose the plot at some point.
Nonetheless, on the outside, it didn’t seem that Dalton had the makings of a maniac.
In fact, his life looked like the picture of perfect middle America.
Born on June 22, 1970, he grew up in a small rural community called Greenfield, not too
far from Indianapolis.
By all accounts, he had a regular childhood, replete with happy family gatherings and good
relationships with his peers.
He was never beaten at home, and he wasn’t bullied in school.
He was a good student and even better at sports, competing on the school track team and the
wrestling and football teams.
In short, Dalton didn’t seem to have any kind of childhood trauma that could explain
his incredibly grievous actions later in life.
After getting married, his wife worked in sales and pulled in about $40,000 a year,
and he earned around $50,000 working in insurance, so combined, they weren’t exactly short
of cash, although Dalton would later work as an Uber driver to earn some extra money.
Importantly, though, he had two big obsessions.
Those were rather masculine cars and something that might go with such cars: guns.
He loved his guns, like any good old red-blooded American.
This short and stocky man, still muscular from his wrestling days in school, spent much
of his free time shooting his guns and working on his various car projects.
His friends said his marriage seemed to be made in heaven.
He was also extremely devoted to his two kids.
And this was exactly how things were in 2016 when Dalton walked into a local gun shop and
purchased a 9mm semiautomatic handgun.
The owner knew him and said that day he seemed in his usual “good spirits.”
And then the devil got a hold of Jason Dalton.
February 20, 2016.
A man named Matt Mellen ordered an Uber.
The night before, he’d left his car at a buddy’s house, and so he wanted to go and
pick it up.
At precisely 4.21 pm, the Uber arrived with Dalton as the driver in a silver Chevrolet
Equinox.
Mellen sat in the front because Dalton’s pet German Shepherd dog had taken the back
seat.
On the drive, Dalton took a call through his speaker, and Mellen listened in.
He happily spoke to a child about dinner plans.
Nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Then something happened, exactly what, we can’t say, but it might have had something
to do with a certain notice on his phone.
Mellen later explained, "That's when he pretty much slammed the gas pedal.
Then, boom, we were off.
It was pedal to the metal.
Probably 75 to 80 miles an hour down this road.
I was bracing for impact basically.”
Mellen screamed as Dalton swerved into oncoming traffic.
He drove right through a median strip, through a stop sign, and then hit a Ford on the side.
At this point, Mellen’s heart was racing.
He screamed at Dalton, “Please stop!
You just hit someone!”
But his driver, not even looking to his side, seemed like a man possessed.
Maybe he was…
Finally, the maniac stopped.
Mellen got out and without hesitation called 911.
He looked up and saw the back of Dalton’s head as the car raced away.
Mellen could have had no idea how close he was to being shot.
A little later, Dalton called his wife and asked her for the keys to his Hummer H3.
She told him she’d take them to his parents’ place and give them to him there.
But before Dalton could get there, he received another notice on his Uber app, this time
from someone wanting a ride from an apartment complex in Richland Township.
He put his foot down as soon as he saw the message.
We can have no idea what he was thinking at this point, but it seems he had murder on
his mind.
When he arrived at the complex, he stopped the car, opened the window, and talked to
a woman named Tiana Carruthers.
She later said, “Feb. 20, is the day that my whole life changed.”
She was with her young kids when Dalton screamed to a halt.
He asked her if she was Maci, the person who’d made the call.
She told him she wasn’t.
At first, he drove off, but for some reason, he then began to turn the car around.
Slowly he drove back towards Carruthers, his mean face staring right at her.
As he got closer, he pointed his gun and shot her four times.
She was in shock, barely feeling the bullets.
As she fell to the ground, one of them dangerously lodged itself in her liver.
Her quick thinking and decision to play dead probably saved her life.
Thankfully, her children were unharmed.
The person who made the Uber request then sent Dalton a message, saying she’d made
a mistake and the address had changed.
At this point, he was driving like a lunatic and would likely have had a head-on collision
had the driver of the other car not swerved out of the way.
Dalton then hit another car after going through a red light.
When he finally stopped, he messaged the person back, simply saying, “Something has come
up”, explaining that he couldn’t make the pick-up.
After more hectic driving, he returned home.
He told his wife he’d been hit, and someone had shot at him.
He looked at her like he’d never looked at her before and told her to arm herself.
He said it wasn’t safe outdoors.
He said she should keep the gun on her and not let the kids out of the house.
“You’ll see it on the news,” he told her, without explaining what had happened.
She was suspicious because he couldn’t look her in the eye.
He then told her to take the dog.
He had to go out.
Was the devil calling to him again?
After his Hummer failed to start, he took the Chevrolet HHR, the car usually reserved
for his wife.
At 6.44 pm, he got some money from an ATM.
He then drove around for a while and returned home again, this time to switch guns from
a Glock to a Walther P99.
For the next hour, he responded to his Uber requests and took people to their destinations.
The passengers later said he drove at the normal speed, was friendly, and didn’t look
at all worried or panicked.
Why he left these people alone is something of importance that we’ll come back to later.
The last pick-up that went without incident was at 9.21 pm.
He took three people from the Fairfield Inn, near a Cracker Barrel restaurant, which he
will soon return to, to the Kalamazoo Beer Exchange.
All three passengers said their driver looked and drove fine.
At this point, a loving husband and father named Richard Smith had arrived with his son
at a Ford KIA Dealership.
The son, Tyler, wanted to show his pop a truck he’d had his eyes on.
Sadly, this was to be their last day out together because Dalton had arrived at the showroom,
and he believed he was still on a mission from Satan.
Dalton walked up to the two and asked them what cars they were interested in.
He then just shot them down in a hail of bullets.
Between them, the two Smiths were shot 18 times.
In utter shock, Tyler’s girlfriend, Alexis Cornish, ducked for cover while still in the
car outside.
Once Dalton was gone, she used her boyfriend’s phone to call 911.
The father and son died from their injuries at the scene.
The Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety received a call saying “shots fired” at
the KIA showroom.
Police then raced to the scene just as investigators were taping off the previous crime scene at
the apartment complex.
When they arrived, they found Alexis hiding in the car and the two males already deceased.
Alexis told police the culprit was a large white male with gray hair.
As the officers were trying to figure out what had gone down, they got another call
over the radio.
Again it said: “shots fired.”
Ten minutes had now passed since the KIA showroom shooting.
It was 10.17 pm when Dalton walked up to a white van in the parking lot of that Cracker
Barrel restaurant he’d been close to earlier.
Sitting in the van was an elderly woman.
Allegedly prompted by the Devil, Dalton asked her something and then shot her.
He turned to the car close by, occupied by four people.
He shot 17 rounds into that vehicle.
Approximately six minutes later, when Dalton was on the road again, a Michigan State Police
trooper arrived at the parking lot to find the woman in the van already dead.
Three of the four people in the other car were also dead.
One of them was Mary Lou, who died next to her sister-in-law, Mary Jo, who also died.
Two of their friends, Dorothy Brown and Barbara Hawthorne, succumbed to their injuries, too.
All of them were in their 60s and 70s.
Hawthorne was with a 14-year old girl named Abigail Kopf.
She was shot in the head but miraculously survived after numerous surgeries.
Now multiple police units were on the lookout for a man driving a Chevrolet HHR who they
were pretty sure was behind all the shootings.
They were told over the radio that they were looking for an “average build male, tall,
dark clothing, possibly blonde hair.”
The undersheriff told a reporter: “We’ve had several shootings here tonight
in the county and the city of Kalamazoo.
They all appear to be related.
We have multiple people dead.
In summary, what it looks like is we have somebody just driving around, finding people,
and shooting them dead in their tracks.”
Meanwhile, Dalton was still using his app.
At 12:04 a.m., he picked up three passengers and took them to a Western Michigan University
dormitory.
They later said the driver seemed completely normal to them, if not a bit unfriendly.
As you’ll see, it was good luck on their part that they weren’t also killed.
Eight minutes later, he took four young passengers from Bell’s Eccentric Café to the Radisson
hotel.
One of them joked, “You’re not the shooter, are you?”
Dalton said no.
Just a few minutes later, during the next trip from Central City Tap House to Rugger’s
Up and Under, one of the three passengers again joked and asked him if he was the killer.
Dalton replied, “Wow, that is crazy.
No way.
I’m not the guy.”
When he pulled up at Rugger’s Up and Under, a police officer spotted the car and called
for backup.
At 12.40 am, it arrived, and in no time at all, Dalton was in handcuffs after putting
up no fight at all.
There was a reason for this.
They found a gun and a ballistic vest in the car, and later after watching surveillance
tapes, they knew they had their man.
While the analysis was being performed on Dalton’s phone and at each crime scene,
he sat with investigators in an interrogation room.
What had happened to this seemingly normal family man?
It seemed he had no motive for the crimes whatsoever.
At first, he didn’t want to talk, but after a while, he started chatting about his beloved
German shepherd.
He also asked to speak to his wife, but soon hung up.
He told the officers he just wanted to hear her voice.
For a long time, the investigators were getting nowhere, but then Dalton surprised them all.
He told them he’d been driving his Uber, and when he heard a beep on his phone, he
looked at the app and saw the Eastern Star.
He then explained, “I just tapped it, and then there was like a devil head that popped
up.
It was some sort of like horned, horned head like a cow head or something.
I pressed that button, and that's where all the problems went after that.”
He explained that when he tapped the devil’s head, it told him he could drive as crazy
as he wanted, and no harm would come to him at all.
He could do what he wanted and say what he wanted, and there would be no repercussions.
He then said that the devil app had two modes: a red mode, and a black mode.
“When it's in that black mode,” he explained, “it literally has control of you.
It would do a little blink at me.”
It was then that he had to do exactly what the devil told him to do.
He said if it then dinged once he had to complete an assignment but if it dinged twice then
he didn’t have to do anything.
So, he explained to the shocked cops, that was the reason why he shot some people and
didn’t shoot others.
He told them that the only reason he didn’t start shooting when he was finally pulled
over was that the devil app was in red mode.
Dalton further explained, “I was no longer being guided.
I mean, that's not my nature to be that way.
The minute that the app went from black to red...I had my presence.”
The officers, of course, had to try to understand whether Dalton really believed this or was
he just trying to act crazy.
One of them said he really did look like he believed in what he was saying.
“It was like he was a puppet,” he said.
Dalton didn’t show much remorse for what he’d done, although he did express some
concern over shooting the young girl.
Still, he seemed to be quite relaxed for a man who’d ruined numerous lives and was
now looking at a long prison sentence.
When police looked into his life, they found what we explained at the start: Dalton was
a well-liked family man who was respected in his community.
A couple of people talked about how he would fire his guns all the time and that he could
at times go from placid to agitated, but other than that, there seemed to be no explanation
why he had gone on his rampage.
He just kept telling the detective the same thing again and again, such as this:
“The minute that I logged on, to be honest with you, I don't know what happened.
I know you guys are going to have a hard time believing this, but it literally took over
my mind and body.”
It was then up to the courts to decide if he was crazy or not.
Despite his talk of the devil, psychiatrists found him fit to stand trial.
Still, police were stumped as to what had gone wrong, and they still are now.
Dalton might have been a bit wary about burglars, but other than that, he didn’t seem to have
any pathological fears.
He held no extreme views at all.
He was a good father and husband who had just metamorphosed one evening into a brutally
cruel killer.
Even while awaiting trial, he seemed happy enough looking at his cell walls all day.
One detective said, “He's very even-tempered.
He's not upset about anything, he doesn't display any noticeable emotions.”
What the detective said sounded a bit like what happened in the Michael Douglas movie,
“Falling Down”, in which Douglas lost his mind from the vicissitudes of daily life
and went on a mad rampage.
The detective admitted, “We're probably weeks away from finding out, but in the end,
the final analysis might be: This was a guy who just cracked up.”
But there were signs later that Dalton was a very unstable man.
At one point during the trial, one of the survivors, Tiana Carruthers, was giving her
testimony.
She could barely talk through her tears, and that’s when Dalton showed some of his more
unhinged side.
Seemingly without any concern for his victim, he started rambling about “black bags”.
He then shouted at her, “Take it, take it,” and though restrained, he tried to get up
from his chair.
She screamed hysterically, and that’s when he was manhandled out of the courtroom.
It’s difficult to understand what he was trying to do, but let’s just say the quiet
family man at that moment looked like someone capable of killing, and perhaps even believing
Satan talked to him through his Uber app.
On February 5, 2019, after pleading guilty to all charges, Jason Dalton was sentenced
to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Now you need to watch “What Does it Actually Feel Like to be Shot.”
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