Neighbor tried to tell of Beach shooter's behavior

VIRGINIA BEACH

Marcia Elsbery never saw the man who killed two apartment workers and wounded three others on Wednesday. But she heard him all the time.

William T. Smith banged rhythmically on the walls of the apartment beneath her in Thalia Gardens for hours at a time.

Some days it began at 3 a.m., others in mid-afternoon.

"It sounded like doom, doom, doom, doom," she said. "I know it by heart now."

Elsbery realized Smith was a man only from the sound of his groans and his regular bouts of crying. He never would answer the door when she went to investigate.

On June 6, Elsbery complained in a memo to the apartment complex's management company about Smith.

The company told Elsbery in a June 7 e-mail to call the police. She wishes she had.

"The families need to know there were warnings, there were signs," said Elsbery, who said she lived above Smith from Jan. 2007 until last month when she bought a house.

Elsbury wrote her memo to the complex's management company after Smith was especially loud over the previous weekend.

"This man clearly has some sort of mental disability," she wrote. "He beats on the walls, he will not answer the door or come outside, and the patio window has a sheet over it. Outside of that, I could hear him weeping and crying periodically throughout Sunday afternoon."

The message also noted there was no response to her repeated requests for apartment security to intervene.

The one-sentence e-mail reply to Elsbery's memo said, "If the situation that you went through over the weekend should occur again, please call the police for disturbing the peace."

Property management officials said the apartment was leased to Smith's mother, whom they have not named. They did not know how long he was living there alone.

Her lease, which was to expire March 31, was not going to be renewed because of numerous noise complaints, said Miles Leon, president of S.L. Nusbaum Realty Co., the property manager.

The mother called Wednesday from New York, the day of the shooting, to authorize an inspection of the apartment so she could get her deposit back, Leon said.

Leon said complex workers didn't know that Smith, 52, was there when they went to the apartment to do the inspection, and he answered the door naked.

Workers told Smith they would come back in an hour.

"On the second trip, they expected him to be gone," Leon said.

When workers returned, Smith had armed himself with an AK-47 assault rifle and a MAC 10 9-mm handgun and began shooting, police said.

Police said they still are trying to determine where he got the guns.

Rebecca Hughes, 32, a mother of two and a maintenance worker in the complex, died in the parking lot. Three others were wounded but escaped and were taken to hospitals.

When police entered the apartment, they discovered the bodies of Sam Shestul, 63, a maintenance worker and immigrant from Ukraine, and Smith, who had apparently killed himself.

Police have not named the wounded. Two were in stable condition and one in critical condition, police said Friday.

Smith apparently was a recluse. None of the neighbors interviewed on Friday could say for certain they had met him.

Morgan Fine, whose patio is next to Smith's, said she never saw the man. She found that odd because she said she is on her patio 10-12 times a day to smoke cigarettes.

A piece of white fabric completely blocks the view into the apartment where Smith lived.

"Nobody was ever there," Fine said. "Really strange. You never know who your neighbors are."

At the end of her June memo, Elsbery wrote, "If this man has a disability then he needs to live in an environment that can aid him in his daily living, not in a closed-in apartment with no contact with people for days at a time."

She wished complex management had done something about her warning.

And her own regret: "I wish to this day I would have called the police."

Aaron Applegate, (757) 222-5122. aaron.applegate@pilotonline.com