COLUMBUS – Despite a request from the Pentagon to stand down, citizens with guns have continued to stand guard outside military recruiting stations in central Ohio following the fatal shootings of four marines and a sailor in Chattanooga, Tenn.
READ MORE: In the Columbus Dispatch
They told Larry Fitzpatrick to take his guns and leave, and he did.
He moved across the parking lot to a patch of land shaded by a big, leafy tree where he can still see the entrance to the military recruiting center.
He still waits, still watches. Still has his guns.
“I think everybody thought I left,” said Fitzpatrick, 50, who began guarding the Armed Forces Career Center on W. Broad Street on July 20, days after shootings in Tennessee that left four Marines and a Navy petty officer dead. “I’m literally trying to get these people protection.”
Armed civilians across the country flocked to recruitment centers after the shootings in Chattanooga, and for a while that seemed OK. And then someone accidentally fired an AR-15 into the ground outside a Lancaster center, and the Pentagon asked everyone to go home.
Civilian guards in Lancaster appear to have listened but others continue to show up in Newark and in at least two centers in Columbus, including a recruiting station in South Columbus.
Nobody showed up on Tuesday, the day Christopher Reed, 28, pleaded guilty in Fairfield County Municipal Court to discharging a firearm in city limits last Thursday.