Tux, gun raised suspicion

'I am the emperor,' man said before he's slain at Capitol

Kevin Vaughan, David Montero and Sara Burnett, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 17, 2007 at midnight

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The words were alternately curious and nonsensical, silly and frightening.

"I am the emperor," the man in the dark tuxedo said, standing in Gov. Bill Ritter's outer office Monday afternoon. "I am here to take over state government."

It was just after 2 p.m. on a sun-baked day at the state Capitol. Visitors walked the marbled halls, held onto the polished brass railings. Staffers huddled behind closed doors.

Ritter sat in his temporary office in the Capitol's northwest corner, interviewing a candidate for a judgeship.

A member of his staff working behind the reception desk in his outer office first encountered the man in the tuxedo. She had no way of knowing that police across the state had been told to keep an eye out for him.

'The emperor is coming'

The first sign of trouble came around 10 a.m. Monday at Mister Neat's tuxedo shop in Northglenn. A man walked in the door and said he needed a tuxedo, right away.

He made no attempt to hide his identity. He pulled out his driver's license and a credit card. His name was Aaron R. Snyder, 32.

It was unusual for someone to rent a tux on a Monday morning, store owner Mark Burke said. And as an assistant manager began helping him, things got even stranger.

The man was sweating profusely, Burke said. He was nervous and jittery. And as the employee took his measurements, she realized he was carrying a gun and two knives.

Trying to remain calm, she started making small talk, asking the man what the special occasion was.

"Today is the day he will reign," the man responded, according to a police report filed Monday morning. "The emperor is coming."

The words frightened the woman, Burke said, but "she kept her head on," trying to work as quickly as possible so the man would leave.

The man apparently was in a hurry, too. When the woman said she needed a few minutes to alter his pants, he got frustrated. "He said he needed it now," Burke said.

The man paid for the tuxedo with his credit card. After he left, the woman called the police.

Officers arrived at the store at 11:37 a.m., said Northglenn police Sgt. Steve Garrow. Then they visited the man's parents, Garrow said.

The parents told officers their son had left their house earlier that morning. Northglenn police had had no prior contact with the man, Garrow said, and Snyder had no arrest record in Colorado.

At 1:45 p.m., and again at 1:50 p.m., Northglenn police issued an alert to authorities statewide - a "be on the lookout" report - warning of a man in a tuxedo carrying a gun and knife.

"We felt it was suspicious enough, having somebody who's armed and talking like this," Garrow said. "We didn't know where he was going."

No metal detectors

Normally, Ritter works out of the governor's office in the west side of the building. But the Capitol, which opened 113 years ago, is in the fourth summer of a five- year effort to bring it up to safety codes. Just after the legislative session ended in May, Ritter moved down the hall into the lieutenant governor's office at the northwest corner of the building, just across a corridor from the desk where tours start.

As Ritter worked in his temporary office, Aaron Snyder arrived at the Capitol, wearing the dark, vested tuxedo over a white dress shirt with shiny black shoes.

The Capitol does not have metal detectors at its entrances, and the public is able to come and go without security checks. Metal detectors that were installed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were removed in 2003.

Snyder reportedly stood at the north end of the first floor as though he was going to take a tour. One witness saw him on a knee in the corner, praying.

Then he walked into the governor's office, where he again made the emperor pronouncement. He had a gun, extra bullets in his pocket and a set of headphones apparently designed to muffle the sound of gunfire.

State troopers rushed toward the office. One tried to coax Snyder out into the hallway. But the man would not drop his pistol, and Trooper Jay Hemphill opened fire. Several witnesses would later describe hearing four shots.

Snyder fell dead onto the marbled floor, blood pouring from his wound, just a few steps inside the Capitol's north doors.

Ritter whisked away

Inside Ritter's office, Erich Schwiesow sat across from the governor, hoping to make a good impression so he could land a job as a judge in the 12th Judicial District in southern Colorado.

They were talking about why he wanted the appointment when they heard a series of noises.

"It sounded like a hammer on a nail," Schwiesow said later. "We both looked at each other for about a moment."

Ritter, a longtime prosecutor, thought it sounded like gunshots. But neither felt any sense of urgency.

The interview continued. Less than a minute later, staff members and officers swarmed in, told the pair about the shooting and whisked Ritter away.

In the House Services Office, just outside the elevators on the Capitol's east side, clerk Pat Worley was working as a receptionist when she heard a loud boom.

"I thought 'Holy moly, the scaffolding has fallen,' " she said, referring to the ongoing construction.

Then Worley heard another boom.

"I said, 'That's gunfire. There's no mistaking it,' " she recalled.

Worley and another staffer helped shepherd tourists into their office.

"Some of the kids were crying and scared, but for the most part everyone was calm," said Worley, a 15-year Capitol veteran.

Worley said she walked outside the office and talked to two construction workers who told her a man was dead.

"I said, 'We better get back inside the office, and one of the guys said, 'It's all over. The State Patrol shot him.' "

At the same time, Katie Reinisch, communications director for House Democrats, sat in her temporary office above Ritter's, talking with a colleague and two interns. Four bangs reverberated through the room.

"That sounds like gunshots," someone said.

"Couldn't be - must be construction noise," someone else said.

'What was that?'

Upstairs in the Capitol Dome, Nicole Raney was with her mother and a tour group of about 30 when they heard the shots. Except they didn't know that's what they were.

"We had seen the construction coming in, so people thought it was a nail gun or something," Raney said. "I asked my mom, 'What was that?' "

Within a few minutes, they found out. As the group began to head down the stairs, Theresa Holst came up and told them all to get back into the dome. She said the building was on lockdown but didn't say why.

"I just knew something wasn't right," said Holst, dome tour supervisor.

Via cell phone, someone said there had been a shooting.

Deborah Parker, Raney's mom, was a little scared.

"What if he gets up here to where we are?" she asked Holst.

Holst, however, had locked all the doors leading into the dome and told them they'd be safe. They would just have to wait it out, she told them.

Parker and Raney, who were visiting from Washington, said it was getting so hot in the dome, they had to open all the windows.

For about a half hour, they were mostly quiet. People whispered into their cell phones, trying to get more information about what had happened.

Finally, they were all led downstairs into the basement and left the Capitol.

Witnesses distraught

Just about 30 yards from where the gunman lay dead, witnesses huddled near the elevators, watching police and state troopers unspool yellow tape and tie it around the pillars.

Some people who hadn't seen the shooting began approaching those with eyes wide with terror to ask what happened. A man turned his back to them, shielding a woman he was with from the questioners. She was sobbing.

Next to them, a woman had collapsed into a man's arms, weeping uncontrollably. He cradled her head on his chest. He said a trooper had shot a man, and now his face "didn't exist anymore."

A police officer began asking for witnesses to follow him to the basement. They followed. The woman who had been crying staggered down the stairs.

Capitol staffers, meanwhile, were evacuating out the north door. One of those was House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, unnerved but all right.

By then Ritter, a former Denver district attorney, went "into DA mode," he later said. He separated witnesses and warned them not to talk to each other, knowing it was standard police procedure.

Around 5:15 p.m., the north doors of the Capitol opened and two men carried out the body of the man in the tuxedo. It was strapped to a gurney and covered in a sky blue blanket.

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