Apartment shooter sent e-mail announcing his death

Police say a man living at an upscale Galleria-area apartment complex e-mailed friends and family announcing his own death before shooting two people, beating one and then turning the gun on himself Monday afternoon. The gunman, 48-year-old David Howard Thurm, was apparently angry over his pending eviction from The Post Oak at Woodway, 99 N. Post Oak Lane.

HPD spokesman Capt. Dwayne Ready said Thurm was called to the apartment complex's office just before 1 p.m. yesterday. At 12:53 p.m., he sent an e-mail saying, in part, "I'm very sorry to inform you that David Howard Thurm passed away (died) on 4/23/07. This is not a joke." Two minutes later, Thurm went to the apartment of an upstairs neighbor who KTRK reports had filed noise complaints against Thurm in the past; he knocked on the neighbor's door, then fired four shots through the door, hitting the neighbor twice in the chest. Thurm then reloaded his gun and headed for the office. Witnesses saw him headed for the office and called police and the office staff; the complex manager, 62-year-old Laura Schoellmann, reportedly ushered her employees out of the office before Thurm arrived and shot her to death. "The early warning the manager made to coworkers likely saved their lives,'' Ready said. Thurm then got into a fight with a courier who happened to be carrying papers related to Thurm's eviction notice, pistol-whipping him (it's not clear whether Thurm realized why the courier was there or if the man happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time). The courier got away and Thurm turned his gun on himself.

Thurm, a photographer, had moved to the complex in December; it's not clear yet why he was being evicted, and there also has been little information about a report that Thurm might have threatened Schoellmann in the past few weeks. Needless to say, the incident left residents of The Post Oak at Woodway, where apartments rent for as much as $2,180 a month, shaken. "This is an upscale area with doctors and lawyers," resident Mark Aden, who is moving out of the complex today — not because of the shooting, apparently — told the Chronicle. "You wouldn't expect anything like that would happen in a complex like this."