BLACK MOUNTAIN, N.C. – To neighbors, it looked like a “moonshine shack,” a little yellow wooden hut, with overgrown weeds and no indoor plumbing, banged together by its owner, Robert Lewis Dear Jr.
And whenever Dear came to stay in his shack in the woods, the neighbors in Anderson Acres, a community of about seven houses along a steep, gravel road here, kept their kids inside.
“He was the kind of person you had to watch out for,” said one neighbor, who asked not to be identified, saying he feared retaliation from Dear or his family. “He was a very weird individual. It’s hard to explain, but he had a weird look in his eye most of the time.”
Dear, 57, the man in custody for Friday’s shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, appears to have been a malcontent who drifted from place to place in the past couple of years. In addition to the shack, he lived in a mobile home in another town in North Carolina and a camper on a piece of vacant land in Colorado, which he shared with a woman who moved with him from the East Coast.
Some who knew him found him unremarkable, while others said he seemed delusional and aggressive. He had a history of run-ins with neighbors and police, including arrests for cruelty to animals and being a “peeping Tom.” He was not convicted in either case.
“It’s just too devastating, it’s just something you can’t fathom happening,” Pamela Ross, who was married to Dear nearly 20 years ago, said in a brief interview on Saturday. She declined to comment further.
Dear’s problems with the law date to 1997, when his then-wife reported to police that Dear had assaulted her, according to reports filed with the Sheriff’s Office in Colleton County, South Carolina, where Dear lived at the time. She declined to file charges against him but told police she reported it because she “wanted something on record of this incident occurring.”
Colleton County police released reports of at least seven other incidents where Dear had disputes or physical altercations with neighbors or other residents.
In Anderson Acres, neighbors said they recognized Dear from television news coverage of Friday’s shootings, where police say he killed three people, including a police officer, and wounded nine others.
“He complained about everything,” said the neighbor. “He said he worked with the government, and everybody was out to get him, and he knew the secrets of the U.S.A. He said, ‘Nobody touch me, because I’ve got enough information to put the whole U.S. of A in danger.’ It was very crazy.”
Dear lived in a mobile home in Swannanoa, North Carolina, until about a year ago, said neighbor Dale Reeves. He said Dear’s property is now vacant and for sale. Reeves said Dear “didn’t mingle with anyone.” He said his property was often messy, and at one point he had several Volkswagen Beetles in the driveway.
FBI agents arrived at the shack on Saturday afternoon.
Dear moved to Colorado last year, when he bought a five-acre plot of land in Hartsel, about 40 miles west of Colorado Springs, according to Jim Anderson, the real estate agent who brokered the deal. The previous owner said Dear paid $6,000 for the vacant land.
“He said he wanted a cheap piece of land to put a camper on,” Anderson said.
The realtor said Dear arrived with a small pickup truck and paid $4,000 for a “pull-behind” camper that Anderson’s friend was selling. Anderson said Dear set up the camper on the flat land, which has no trees, and lived there.
Dear also asked Anderson if he could have his mail delivered to Anderson’s address. He came by a couple of times in the past year to pick up letters, which were mainly from the local county.
Dear did nothing that seemed unusual to Anderson, and while he didn’t see Dear with a gun, many people in the area own weapons.
“Out here everybody has a gun,” Anderson said. “There are bears and mountain lions.”
Anderson said he was shaken by the news that Dear was the alleged Colorado Springs shooter. He said Dear’s mug shot on TV looked far more wild-eyed than the average man he met.
“Man. Wow. A shocker,” Anderson said. “He seemed okay to me. Just like anybody who wanted to buy a piece of land in this one-horse town.”
Colorado records show that Dear was registered to vote in Hartsel since at least October 2014. His party was listed as “unaffiliated.”
Anderson also said Dear arrived with a woman, but he did not know her name. Colorado records show that Stephanie Michelle Bragg was registered to vote at the same address earlier this year.
Her ex-husband, Michael Bragg, said she moved to Colorado with Dear about a year ago. Michael Bragg said he had two daughters, ages 19 and 15, with Stephanie Bragg, who had worked as a waitress in a Waffle House. Bragg said he believed that his ex-wife met Dear online.
In Anderson Acres in North Carolina, neighbors said Dear had not been back to his mustard-yellow shack in at least a year. None of the neighbors agreed to be identified by name, saying they feared for their security.
One neighbor said he recalled an incident about five years ago when Dear fell off a motor scooter, broke his collar bone and didn’t get medical help. The neighbor said he could see the bone was broken but Dear said, “No, no, I don’t need anything.”
Dear would often leave two dogs chained up for a couple days at a time and the neighbors complained that they had no food or water. “He would leave the dogs and they would get aggressive” and people were worried about their children, said one neighbor. “He was really tightly wound. You could see that from the stress on his face, from the way he acted. You would wave at him and he would act as though he didn’t see you.”
The neighbors recalled that Dear had a motorcycle and a four-wheel ATV that he would drive up and down the dirt road at high speeds, scaring the local kids.
“I’d get on him and say, ‘Look man, you’ve got to slow down a little bit,’ “ the first neighbor said. “And he’d speed even more, like we weren’t even there. He’d just try to start confrontations all the time.”
The neighbor said Dear would carry a stick as he rode his trail bike, and he’d slow down and try to bait dogs in the area. He said he swung the stick at his dog several times.
Neighbors on Anderson Acres said they never saw Dear with a gun, and they never heard him speak about politics or abortion rights.
“He was just always saying,. ‘I know the U.S. is trying to kill everybody’ and do this and do that. He (said he) was an undercover (agent). Just craziness. Just pure, right-out craziness all the time,” said one local resident.
“I’m kind of glad he’s put away now,” he said.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
