Alumnus targets White House

The gunman who fired shots at the White House Wednesday was an IU alumnus who neighbors described as a quiet man.\nRobert W. Pickett, 47, graduated in 1979 with a degree in history.\nNeighbors said they were surprised to hear that he was identified as the man who shot at the White House Wednesday morning. \nSurprised, but not shocked.\nNeighbors described Pickett as a recluse who lived alone after the death of his parents. They said his only companion was his dog. \nSahar Wafa, a Racine, Wis., resident who lived across the street from Pickett for seven years, said he was unmarried and without family.\n"He was always alone," she said. "I never saw him with any guests. Sometimes I felt no one lived at that house." \nThey said Pickett, an accountant, has long held a grudge against former employer the Internal Revenue Service. While he was largely reserved, they said he made no secret of his strong dislike of the government, which started after he dropped out of West Point in 1972.\n"You knew he didn't like the government," said Mark Jewel, who lives next door and hired Pickett two years ago to handle the accounting for his floral shop, Cottage Florist & Gifts. "(You) could tell he was often aggravated with taxes and the IRS."\nPickett sued the the IRS, said Evansville attorney Joseph Yocum, who served as his legal counsel in the suit before Pickett decided to represent himself. The agency dismissed him from its Cincinnati office in the mid-1980s, prompting him to move back to Evansville, where he took up a job at a downtown accounting firm. \nJewel, who bought a home next to Pickett's in the neighborhood four years ago, said the gunman blended in. \n"It's not a friendly neighborhood," he said. "And though he kept to himself a lot, he was the only person to take the time to introduce himself when I moved in. But I mostly knew him through business."\nOthers remember Pickett as easygoing, often seeing him outside mowing his lawn or playing with his dog.\n"I thought he wouldn't have done something like that," said neighbor Judi Gates, who first heard the news when her husband called her at her mother's home. "I thought they had the wrong Robert Pickett."\nGates, a 51-year-old painter, had a casual interaction with Pickett, whom she describes as "kind of a loner."\n"He's a nice fellow," she said. "I wouldn't have expected it from him."\nPolice and Secret Service agents raided Pickett's home Wednesday afternoon. Capt. Bill Welcher of the Evansville Police Department said they were looking for threatening letters to President George W. Bush or Rep. John Hostettler, R-8th. Welcher said Pickett had sent letters over the past year to Hostettler's offices in Indiana and Washington, complaining about the IRS.\nThe police raid caused a commotion in the usually placid neighborhood.\nBrenda Payton, another neighbor, drove home to find her street blocked off. Television cameras and police cars surrounded Pickett's home, she said.\n"We live in a very routine neighborhood," she said. "It's quite an ordeal."\nStaff writer Freddie Yap and the Associated Press contributed to this report.