‘Ignore him’: The story of mass murder in a GTA condo tower

Thestar.com
July 24, 2023
Michele Henry

A few hours before his wife was shot and friends were killed, John Di Nino got a call from fellow condo board member Rita Camilleri, asking him to look at the latest videos.

“You have to see them,” she said. “He did a dump.”

Di Nino, president of the board, pulled his laptop onto the kitchen counter and cracked it open.

It was about 2 p.m. on the Sunday before Christmas last year and Di Nino, 56, was preparing antipasti for dinner with friends. The last thing he wanted was to turn his mind to Francesco Villi, the “owner of unit 104” and the Bellaria II’s resident troublemaker.

But this sounded serious.

After a months-long hiatus from social media, Villi, a 74-year-old former bricklayer from Catanzaro, Italy, had just posted a slew of new videos, including one 18 minutes long. Di Nino watched in silence as Villi railed, snot drooling from his nostrils, about a plot to “murder” him. He was sick and getting sicker, Villi alleged, loudly, urgently, because Di Nino and his board were refusing to fix problems in his suite.

The next morning, Di Nino, the rest of the board and its lawyers were due in court to face off with Villi for what they’d hoped would be the last time. After four years of war -- both in court and in the shared spaces of their swanky, suburban condo tower -- they expected a judge to force Villi to vacate his suite. For good.

Di Nino and the others knew Villi was upset; that he didn’t want to leave.

But it was too late.

The board had bent over backwards, court records show, to try and appease him, but no matter what Di Nino and previous boards did, Villi lashed out. He spat at neighbours, calling the women “pigs” and “fat bitches.” He followed accountant Russell Manock and his wife around the grounds, a sprawling complex a stone’s throw from Canada’s Wonderland, confronting them by the elevators and prompting the Manocks to change their routes and schedules to avoid him.

Camilleri was a particular target of Villi’s ire. When he saw her, he glared. Online and in court documents, he humiliated her with baseless accusations that she’d committed fraud, “criminal harassment” and extortion.

Once Di Nino took the board’s helm in August 2018, Villi turned his menacing attention to him, parading outside the Bellaria II, the second of four towers built near Rutherford and Jane streets in Maple, in a slanderous sandwich board.

Di Nino shut his computer and grimaced.

These latest videos were “concerning,” Di Nino told Camilleri over the phone. But so were the dozens, at least, that Villi had posted since early 2017, when he discovered the power of Facebook and Twitter, shortly after then-U.S.-president-elect Donald Trump rode social media to his unprecedented victory. Before saying goodbye to Camilleri for what would be the last time that afternoon, Di Nino told her he didn’t see this new batch of videos as any different or worse.

“Talk tomorrow,” he said. “See you later.”

We may never know exactly what Villi did during those final few hours of his life -- York Regional Police aren’t talking -- but as day turned to night on Dec. 18, 2022, Villi pulled a dark hoodie over his wiry white hair, stuck a semi-automatic Beretta 92A1 9 mm up its right sleeve and set off to stalk the hallways of the condo tower.

By the time he committed “suicide by cop” around 7:30 p.m., Villi had murdered Camilleri, a dark-haired spitfire who was popular at the condo, and her husband Vittorio Panza, a well-respected and impeccably dressed realtor and grandfather of NHL defenceman Victor Mete; Manock, a chartered accountant known for his wit and generosity, and his wife Lorraine, a well of warmth and kindness; and board member Naveed Dada, a local real estate agent reportedly nicknamed “Mr. Smiley.”

victims_grid
Clockwise from top left: Russell Manock, 75, and his wife, Helen, 71; Rita Camilleri, 57; Naveed Dada, 59; and Vittorio Panza, 79; are the five victims killed in the mass shooting.

Jiang, Kevin
He’d also darkened Di Nino’s door, shooting his wife Doreen in the face and shattering her jaw, before taking a step forward -- and pointing the gun at him.

In the moment, Di Nino didn’t register the threat. But now, nearly eight months later, his mind, like a tick he can’t control, flips back there.

After several surgeries, Doreen is on the road to recovery. You’d never know a bullet sped through her right cheek, left her head via the base of her skull, then exited her home through the tall, glass patio doors at the other end of their suite. But below the surface, she fears she’ll never remember “normal” again; Di Nino’s scars, too, aren’t visible.

Within days of the deadliest mass shooting in the GTA’s recent history, he was back at work as head of the Amalgamated Transit Union. Behind the scenes, though, he was waving away death threats from people who blamed him and his dead colleagues for the massacre -- and silently falling down a rabbit hole of questions: How did he and the three dinner guests he and Doreen hosted that evening become the only ones to face off with Villi that night and escape physically unscathed? More, how did he and the others so grossly underestimate the threat posed by a neighbour who seemed little more than a grumpy old man?

In quieter moments, Di Nino’s breath quickens and the skin around his eyes turns red as he wonders if he should have known that Villi was not just a nuisance but a danger. It’s a question asked by survivors, victims’ families and commentators in the aftermath of many other mass shootings.

Such questions are particularly acute in cases like Villi’s, where violence is preceded by years of unstable and antisocial behaviour, including harassment and abuse. A deep dive into Villi’s life, drawing upon a voluminous record of court files, interviews and close scrutiny of the gunman’s own social media posts, reveals a story of a man who appears in hindsight to have been a walking red flag.

But could anyone have known -- and could he have been stopped?

A history of abuse
By all measures, at least since immigrating to Canada in 1966, Francesco Villi was aggressive, abusive, coercive and controlling.

Sources who knew him in those years described him as abusive and capricious; the kind of man who called women “bitches” and made up rules like a woman shouldn’t cross her legs, then reacted with violence when they were broken.

Twice married, Villi had two daughters with his first wife before divorcing her after six years in 1978; he had a third daughter with a second wife before separating from her about a decade later. Each time Villi ended a marriage, court documents reveal, he failed to pay child support. Once, he badly beat a spouse while she was eight months pregnant, getting away with it, sources say, by threatening to kill her if she reported the abuse.

Villi’s family declined to speak to the Star for this story. But after his death, the family released a statement saying he was a “controlling and abusive husband and father” with a “history of domestic abuse with both the mothers of his children and his daughters ... aggressive behaviour and a Jekyll and Hyde-type personality.” In his later years, his kids tried to have a relationship with their dad and offered him help, but he refused, “leaving them no choice but to cut off ties with him for their own health and well-being,” they wrote.

A mason by trade, he appears to have made some of his living off getting into accidents and claiming benefits. Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, court records show, Villi was involved in at least 10 accidents of various kinds after claiming to be injured on the job in 1973, according to court records, and then winning a weekly payout from the WSIB. In that first recorded instance, Villi twisted his back and hurt his knee when a lid from a tub of mortar fell on him.

Over the next two decades, at least, he was off work for several months each year for other types of problems. It’s unclear exactly how much he earned but in 1993, court records show he secured another weekly payout after being involved in two car accidents on the same day.

An arbitrator later denied Villi’s attempt to extend those insurance payouts, explaining he was unable to find Villi “credible.”

At around the same time, despite divorce records that show Villi had stopped paying child support, he was able to buy a home in Adjala-Tosorontio, near Barrie, which he sold in 2008 for nearly $700,000. A few months later, he purchased unit 414 at the newly built Bellaria II; within a month of moving into the condo, Villi was already driving staff to the brink, according to a series of lawsuits that started in 2011.

Steve Russell
He made mischief. Villi removed deodorizers from the garbage rooms and tampered with air grates. Over several years, he even triggered false fire alarms, twice telling staff he did it to “check their response times,” court records show.

And, of course, Villi complained -- about everything. His grievances were endless and ever-shifting. The smell of a neighbour’s cologne. The odour from the garbage rooms. A cleaning agent used on the lobby floors. Metal hangers. His space in the parking garage. Air quality. Finally, vibrations and noise permeating the floor of his suite from the electrical room directly below it. At some point, to underscore his complaints, Villi presented the board with drawings he alleged proved the electrical room had been shoddily built.

Each time, the court files reveal, building staff and the condo board went to great lengths to investigate and find solutions to Villi’s complaints, even as they discovered the problems didn’t appear to exist or, according to inspection reports, were “below the lower range” of acceptable indoor noise or “were well within the acceptable” limits of smell or sound.

The board considered building a buffer between the floor of Villi’s unit and the electrical room beneath it, even after discovering the drawing he gave them was an early rendering of another room entirely. And, according to the board’s lawyers, both were, in fact, built to code.

In 2010, Despite his complaints, Villi got a spot on the building’s fledgling, three-member board of directors.

Joining then-president Dino Colalillo, a local furniture entrepreneur, and Naveed Dada in monthly meetings, Villi helped do the kinds of things homeowners move into condos to avoid: setting maintenance schedules, creating a reserve fund, hiring a gardener.

From the get-go, Colalillo remembers, it was clear Villi was a character; old-school, always up in arms.

But, over time, he says, it became clear he was also an impediment to getting anything done. At each meeting, Villi would steer the agenda off the rails. “Were staff stealing pencils, or wasting electricity?” Colallilo says, recalling the types of concerns Villi fixated on. After about five months, Colalillo says, he and Dada agreed Villi had to go.

Seeking advice, Colalillo reached out to the lawyer representing the Bellaria II’s property management company and discovered the board wasn’t the only one having issues with him. The company had already filed its first lawsuit against Villi, asking for more than half a million dollars in damages for his “malicious” and harassing behaviour as well as a restraining order forbidding him from communicating with its staff, except by email. The best way to stop his conduct, Colalillo says the lawyer told him, was to join the lawsuit.

Colalillo thought it over.

With four units in the tower -- one for him and his wife and one for each of his three kids and their young families -- Colalillo says he joined the board to safeguard his investment. More, he says, he’d wanted to create a “Seinfeld” atmosphere -- “open doors always.” Colalillo was frustrated by Villi but still didn’t want to hurt him.

The GTA was in the throes of a record-breaking heat wave when, in the summer of 2011, he and Dada took Villi for lunch at Nino D’Aversa, an Italian bakery in Vaughan. Over pizza and Brio, they got him to sign a letter agreeing to leave the board and stop bothering building staff. Before returning to work that afternoon, Colalillo says, he marched over to the lawyer’s office, held out the letter and said he’d hand it over, but only if the company dropped its lawsuit.

“We still have to live with him,” Colalillo says he told the lawyer, winning him over.

Three weeks later, Villi sold his suite and Colalillo thought he could put him in the past. But in 2014, Villi called to say he wanted to move back. “Well,” Colalillo says he told him. “I can’t stop you.”

And so, in late November 2016, Villi moved back, this time into unit 104, the suite directly above the electrical room he would later complain about. Immediately, Colalillo says, he noticed Villi seemed “more sensitive than before,” especially to sounds and smells no one else could hear or sniff.

After a sewage pipe burst in the suite directly above Villi’s unit that November, Colalillo says Villi was particularly distraught, even as the condo’s insurer made arrangements to fix, and pay for, the damage. But Villi, affidavits show, refused to let its contractors into his suite. Though he accepted cash for some of the repairs, it’s unclear if he ever made the fixes that, Colalillo says, could have included a buffer between his floor and the ceiling of the electrical room below.

Weeks later, Villi began to complain about a “musty” smell. Then, just as he had two years earlier, Villi moved out, this time renting his suite to an elderly couple who, court documents show, didn’t smell a thing.

Once again, Colallilo thought the issue was done. But in early 2017, Villi moved back for good. This time, he went public with his gripes, complaining on social media.

“THIS ILLNESS START AFTER THE WATER DAMAGE and people responsible never cleaned,” he alleged in one representative post from March 27, 2017. “THANK YOU TO ALL DOES (sic) THAT HAVE TRIED SO HARD TO DO ME HARM, YOU HAVE SEXEED (sic).”

‘Ignore him’
doreen
John Di Nino and Doreen Di Nino inside their condo unit in Vaughan. Doreen was shot during the mass shooting at the condo in December.

Lance McMillan
John Di Nino was first introduced to Villi in early 2017, shortly after he and Doreen moved into the Bellaria II. She came back shaken from her first walk one winter afternoon with Missy, their elderly Shih Tzu. Villi had yelled at her after she unwittingly broke a condo rule by taking Missy outdoors through the wrong lobby.

“Ignore him,” Di Nino told her at the time. And he followed his own advice months later when Villi sidled up to him one evening after work, introduced himself and started railing about Colallilo and collusion.

Di Nino smiled and gave him a pat on the back. About a year later in March 2018, when Di Nino first got a spot on the condo board, he barely remembered the exchange. And, since he wasn’t on social media, he had no idea that Villi was posting relentlessly, already fixated on an electrical room directly below his unit.

He wrote again and again that Colalillo and the board were refusing to build that buffer to dampen what he claimed were unbearable sounds and vibrations. But even after Colalillo started to fill in Di Nino about Villi’s history -- including having to force him off the board -- Di Nino was unfazed.

After nearly 35 years in labour relations, most as head of Canada’s largest transit union, he is an expert on dealing with difficult people and addressing their grievances. In fact, he teaches the class on it to new union stewards across North America.

To him, Villi was a grumpy old man. Often, Di Nino would offer to help with Villi, figuring the situation just needed fresh eyes. But each time, Colalillo would wave him away, saying “It’s nothing” or “It’s fine” and insisting Villi was his cross to bear (he felt guilty, he would later say, for allowing Villi back into the building).

In spring 2018, Colalillo fingered Di Nino to replace him as board president.

He’d had enough of Villi, he’d later explain in an emailed resignation letter. “I started to fear for the safety of my children, grandchildren as well as my wife and I,” Colalillo wrote.

By the time Di Nino officially took the board’s helm that summer, Villi had already shifted his focus to the new president. Night and day, Villi would stand at the kiosk in the visitors’ lobby and dial Di Nino’s suite until someone answered. Then, in a frantic voice, he’d insist that Di Nino come down to his suite and “smell something burning.”

“You can’t be calling me like this,” Di Nino says he told Villi several times, until, one early morning, he caved.

At 8 a.m., Di Nino, standing beside a building security guard, greeted Villi, telling him the guard was going to join them to provide an impartial nose.

Villi was indignant, Di Nino recalls, and aggressive. “Either you come by yourself,” Villi said, “or nobody’s coming into my condo at all.”

“Then I guess it’s nobody,” Di Nino answered.

The next day, Camilleri called Di Nino to tell him to check Facebook. Villi had posted a picture of Di Nino, calling him a liar alongside his address, phone number, email and suite number.

By September 2018, Camilleri was at her wit’s end. In an email to the rest of the board, she described the Villi situation as “intolerable.” His obsession with the perceived vibrations and noise beneath his floor had become all-consuming, she suggested in her email, and wondered if the board should consider building the buffer Villi said he wanted.

“I believe it would be in the Corps best interest to consider,” Camilleri wrote. “ALL OF US would agree that even if we spend $6 to 10K to remedy ... it will not just relieve him from the noise he claims there is, but also would likely relieve us from other noise he is creating on the property.”

In October, at a board meeting he’d invited himself to, Villi faced Di Nino across a table in the Bellaria’s Venetian Room to discuss it.

Behind Villi was Teresa Vu, a realtor he’d met before selling his home near Barrie several years earlier. He’d called her over the years, she told the Star, as he toyed with selling his various units at the condo tower, asking her, this time, to come to the meeting and see for herself how poorly he was being treated by the board. Vu now sees that Villi was misleading and using her. But at the time, she says, she had no reason to think he was lying and, feeling good about advocating for an elderly man, she believed him when he told her the board had refused to fix the issue and treated him like he was “crazy.”

Within minutes, Di Nino noticed Villi’s hands were under the table.

“Are you recording?” Di Nino said as he began to lose his trademark patience.

“None of your business,” Di Nino said Villi told him before the meeting devolved into shouting.

After Villi and Vu left, John Santoro, another board member at the time, spoke up about his disgust at the way the others had treated Villi.

Santoro, a long-time resident at the Bellaria II, had a kinship with the elderly man. The two were allied over their individual struggles with the board. And, from time to time, Santoro says, he and his wife had Villi over for coffee, often trying to calm him down and get him to stop posting his vitriol on Facebook. “I wanted to help him,” Santoro says, noting that for a while after Villi fired lawyer after lawyer, he even helped write some of his legal documents.

One evening in mid-2018, Santoro had just gotten home from work when Villi rang urgently over the phone, asking him to come down to unit 104 and open an envelope that seemed like it might contain bad news. Villi turned around and shut his eyes as Santoro, standing in Villi’s foyer, ripped it open.

“Frank,” Santoro said, removing the slip of paper inside. “No need to be scared. It’s just your gun license. It’s been renewed!”

As soon as the words came out of his mouth, Santoro says, he remembers thinking: “This isn’t going to end well.”

In late fall 2018, and despite Santoro’s protestations, the board finally escalated the fight, filing a lawsuit and asking the courts to stop Villi from harassing, recording or making social media posts about staff or board members at the Bellaria II. The hope, Di Nino says, was it would scare him off.

It worked.

But not for long. Soon enough, Villi resumed his defamatory online posting and the board’s lawyers took him back to court to seek a compliance order, a kind of restraining order available under the Condominium Act.

On Oct. 24, 2019, Di Nino marvelled at how contrite and well-spoken Villi could be when he wanted to be. From a seat in a Newmarket courtroom, he watched as Villi, head up, shoulders square, defended himself to a judge.

Villi’s court filings, the ones he wrote himself, were a mash-up of scribbled notes, irrelevant information and wordy diatribes. “My opinion,” he wrote in one, “is this is negligence Abuse of Power Fraud Discrimination against Francesco Villi; They have Destroy Me Physically Mentally and Financially.” He would also spout frightening religious tropes.

Di Nino asked the board’s lawyers if they should ask a court to order Villi into psychiatric testing -- but the chat ended quickly. Villi had never threatened anyone’s life or his own. He lived alone and was clearly coherent before a judge.

In the field of condominium law, Di Nino says the board’s lawyers explained, problem residents were a dime a dozen -- and Villi was practically Pollyanna compared to the mischief-makers in the insular, often vertical communities where strangers share space and financial interests.

‘It’s not like these people come out of nowhere’
While over 80 per cent of mass shooters were in crisis “in the hours, weeks, or months leading up to the incident,” according to the Violence Project, a 2019 mass shooter database created by two U.S. professors, the relationship between mental illness and mass shootings is complex and unclear. And in fact, Canada’s Mass Casualty Commission, the landmark probe into the 2020 Mass shooting in rural Nova Scotia, notes that those who struggle with mental health issues are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence.

Ultimately, the Commission says, no one knows what causes or motivates this crime. But, in the rear-view mirror, these men -- mass shooters are overwhelmingly men -- appear to have a lot in common.

Often disgruntled women-haters, they feel victimized by a world they’d been raised to believe was theirs to inherit, but now seems desperately out of reach. Most, the Violence Project says, have grievances, get validation for their beliefs, choose a handgun to commit their crime and have long-established patterns of violence. Nearly all, it also says, were abused as children or witnessed abuse.

Villi, it appears, was cut from the same cloth as so many others in his murderous cohort, including Gabriel Wortman, the wealthy denturist who, in mid-April 2020, spent 13 hours driving across rural Nova Scotia in a replica police car, killing 22 people.

Wortman was more sophisticated than Villi, but both men were coercive and abusive, physically, verbally and emotionally to their intimate partners, neighbours and community members. They both dabbled in insurance fraud. They’ve both been described by those who knew them as having Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-type personalities.

We don’t know much about Villi’s childhood, but sources tell the Star that he was belted as a child. Wortman too was abused as a boy, the Commission says, and also witnessed violence.

SIU
A history of exposure to domestic violence in childhood is one of several risk factors for committing violence later in life, Katreena Scott, academic director at the Centre for Research and Education on Violence Against Women and Children, says. Others include obsessive, sexist and jealous behaviour, a recent separation from an intimate partner, being isolated and a history of depression and suicidality.

They are also warning signs, she says, that are opportunities for intervention to prevent future violence. Yet, time and again, she says, society fails to see these warning signs as problematic -- or is reluctant to view them as serious, so men like Villi and Wortman often get away with their bad behaviour.

I research mass shootings, but I never believed one would happen in my own condo in Vaughan
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In the wake of the Nova Scotia massacre, the commission made 130 recommendations, including a call to take a “public health approach” to preventing mass violence, a ban on semi-automatic handguns, and a series of steps stemming from the recognition that most serious violence is “a gendered phenomenon,” largely committed by men and boys.

Butting out this kind of violence will take a “whole society approach,” the Commission concluded, one that demands change at the most basic levels and at the highest, including amending the Family Law Act as well as Canada’s Criminal Code to include “coercive control” between intimate partners. (The commission notes the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police supports the creation of a new Criminal Code offence for coercive control between intimate partners.)

“For far too long,” the Commission says, “we have misperceived mass violence as our greatest threat without considering its relationship to other more pervasive forms of violence.”

At the same time, though, Ragy Girgis, psychiatrist and Columbia University mass shooting researcher, says, mass shootings are still a catastrophic consequence of personal, social and political factors that are as mysterious as they are tangled and complex.

There’s no shortage of people who behave like Villi -- or worse -- and don’t go on to commit this crime, he says. “That’s why,” he says, “it’s impossible to see a mass shooter before he strikes. You just can’t see them coming.”

‘Our only choice’
As Di Nino and the others watched Villi in court that mid-October day, they didn’t know about his history of abuse. They didn’t know that Villi had been a heavy smoker for 30 years, and, according to doctors’ notes obtained by the Star, suffered from chronic lung diseases as well as depression and suicidal ideation. They didn’t know that sometime in 2019, he’d bought a gun -- and had a license to use it.

Despite Villi’s confidence during that hearing, a judge issued an order to stop him from harassing, communicating with, recording and posting about the board members and the Bellaria II. This time, Villi went mum on social media for nearly two years.

Meanwhile, it appears, he decided to try to beat the board at its own game, filing two countersuits at two different courthouses. In them, he alleged board members as well as an arbitrator were stealing money and colluding to kill him. (Ultimately a judge dismissed Villi’s countersuits as “frivolous and/or vexatious,” finding Villi provided a “complete absence of material facts” to support his claims.) He also started lashing out in person. Often, he would sit on a couch in the main resident lobby off the parking garage and watch neighbours come and go, occasionally verbally attacking residents and visitors, including Di Nino and his elderly mother. After several similar incidents, a judge found Villi in contempt for breaching the restraining order, calling it a “serious offence.”

Once again, Villi fell silent. This time, both online and in person. Hoping Villi had finally gotten the message, the board cancelled an upcoming hearing to determine his punishment for breaching the restraining order.

But two weeks later, Villi dropped a new Facebook post. Then another and another, each more chilling than the last.

“If I Francesco Villi Die,” he wrote on April 20, 2022, “these people are totally and Solely Responsible for my Death, Not matter who my Death be … they have no Remorse no Conscience no Dignity no Shame no integrity no morality; they are Money hungry and love and respect money only; have Zero concern for humanity and human lives.”

The board’s lawyers decided to re-ignite the punishment hearing. Perhaps, they reasoned, he’d only be chastened if they took a hard line. But on Sept. 26 last year, as Di Nino and the board’s lawyers once again sat in a Newmarket courtroom watching Villi defend himself (he had long ago fired his lawyers), they noticed a curious exchange. Villi told the judge that he’d tried to sell his suite unsuccessfully and, both in court and in her written decision the next day, the judge told him: “List it again.”

Board lawyer Megan Mackey perked up in her seat. Until that moment, the board hadn’t considered trying to get Villi to move out. But it suddenly seemed like the obvious resolution. Immediately, Mackey revised her “factum,” the written argument lawyers use to advocate for their clients, and Di Nino called an emergency board meeting.

“If our last effort is to have him removed,” Di Nino said he told the others. “I think we need to go down that road. It’s our only choice.”

In short order, Mackey reached out to Villi to try to negotiate a voluntary exit. Villi refused and a hearing was set for Dec. 19, 2022.

At the Bellaria II’s annual Christmas party that year, Di Nino was chatting with friends when he saw Villi walk in and shake hands with all his future victims, before striding over to him, palm outstretched. But Di Nino was three weeks out of colorectal surgery; he held fast to his walker.

“Sorry Frank,” Di Nino said, declining the handshake. “I can’t.”

“My friend, that’s right, you are sick,” Villi responded. “May God bless you. I wish only the best for you.”

As he watched Villi walk away, Di Nino felt a sense of foreboding.

Villi, meanwhile, was seemingly growing more desperate. Over WhatsApp, he texted Vu about his frustration with the board. She responded: “You need to weigh the good and the bad and if it’s better to let go and live your life … Jesus said forgive because they do not know what they do.”

“Thank you Teresa,” he replied. “But I am Broke and no place to go an (sic) $200.000.00 on my line of Credit. And this people want me Dead … Take care.”

A few days before the mass shooting, Villi left a message for one of his ex-wives, saying he wanted to apologize for the abuse.

The night of
Distant city lights broke through the dark outside the Di Ninos’ windows as they and their guests, a couple and their 21-year-old daughter, finished dinner and decided to head home. Di Nino pushed back his chair and headed with them to the foyer.

But as they stood ready to go, the fire alarm began to wail. Explaining the elevators wouldn’t be back online until the alarm stopped, Di Nino ushered everyone back inside and onto couches in the living room. Amid renewed chatter, he took out his phone to show one guest his plans to take Doreen to Hawaii as soon as he fully recovered. But as he turned his screen toward his friend, they heard a loud bang on a floor below. About 30 seconds later, someone was banging at their door.

“Slow down,” Di Nino shouted at Doreen when she leapt up to answer it, warning her the door could be hot. “Maybe there really is a fire!” From his recliner, less than a dozen feet away, he watched as she approached the foyer and reported back that it was cool, before placing her eye to the peephole and yanking open the door.

Di Nino heard her shriek “Oh my god” just as Villi raised his arm and pulled the trigger. But, for a split second as that shot rang out, he couldn’t tell if it was real, or a joke. “Maybe,” he remembers thinking, “Villi is just trying to scare us.”

Lance McMillan
Then he saw his Doreen bleeding onto the carpet of their foyer. Rising, he leaned back like his middle wasn’t held together by dissolving stitches, swiped a crystal vase off the coffee table to his left and whipped it at Villi before lunging toward another nearby table, grabbing at glasses, bottles, plates still strewn with dinner -- anything he could reach. As glass shattered and ricocheted, a guest crawled over to Doreen and pulled her to a bedroom around the corner. Leaving her there, she then snuck back to the door and slammed it. As it shut, Di Nino says he saw Villi retreat.

He rushed to Doreen and, holding her, used a free hand to dial his fellow board members as they waited for paramedics to arrive. If Villi came looking for him, Di Nino reasoned, he might be looking for them, too. He called Camilleri, Dada and Manock. He hadn’t seen it coming, couldn’t have, but maybe now he could warn them. “I wanted to tell them not to open their doors,” he said. “But no one answered.”