Harold O'Llynnger, 82, who lives across from von Brunn at an Annapolis apartment complex, said he and his girlfriend had him over for a drink three months ago. Asked if he made racist comments, O'Llynnger said, "The only thing he said was that the media covered the Holocaust too much."
But O'Llynnger's girlfriend was so appalled by the comment that she left the apartment, he said.
Nearly three decades ago, von Brunn committed an act that bore similarities to Wednesday's shooting, albeit with no injuries. In December 1981, he walked into the Federal Reserve Board's Washington headquarters with weapons and a plan to confront the bank's governors, according to news accounts.
Carrying a revolver, a hunting knife and a sawed-off shotgun in a satchel, von Brunn raced past a guard to the second floor, where the board was meeting. He pulled the shotgun on another guard in the corridor leading to the boardroom.
The guard called for help, and von Brunn was overpowered before anyone got hurt. News accounts said he told police he wanted to focus attention on the board's responsibility for high interest rates and the overall poor state of the economy.
He was convicted in 1983 of attempted kidnapping of board members, among other charges. He served more than six years in prison.
Von Brunn later asserted on an anti-Semitic Web site he created that he had "attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest."
To some who knew him, von Brunn's racial hatred was all-consuming. A woman identified as von Brunn's ex-wife told the New York Daily News on Wednesday that "it's all he would talk about." The woman, who asked the newspaper not to identify her, said he would become "very angry and abusive" when she questioned him.
"He would talk about what the world would become in 20 or 30 years - that most of the country would be governed by black governors and that the Jewish people owned the media," she said. "That's why I divorced him - because he was eaten alive with a cancer with this matter."
Von Brunn once arrived at a downtown Easton art gallery after observing the wedding of a mixed-race couple nearby, and he was livid, said Troika Gallery co-owner Laura Era.
"He was furious about that," Era said. This happened not long after the gallery opened 12 years ago. "It was not good behavior to have in a fine art gallery. We told him he can't talk that way in here."
