He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia six years before the shooting and spent fifty-three days in a mental hospital after threatening a Montana resident . He was released after testing as being of no danger to himself or anyone else . Eighteen months before the shooting , he moved back to Valmeyer from Montana . Once home , he was known to compulsively hack at trees which filled his back yard following the Mississippi River floods of 1993 . There was so much downed timber on his family 's homestead that they had to ask him to stop cutting at trees . Two days prior to the Capitol shooting , at his grandmother 's insistence to do something about nearby cats which were becoming a nuisance , Weston shot and killed 14 cats with a single-barreled shotgun , leaving several in a bucket and burying the rest
Mississippi River floods of 1993
Great Flood of 1993
1998 United States Capitol shooting incident