Nashville shooting suspect held; he once tried to meet President Trump

The Nashville police authorities succeeded in arresting a man accused of killing four persons at the Waffle House restaurant this weekend after a 34-hour manhunt. The incident at the capital of Tennessee sent ripples across the local people as the assassin managed to bluff the lawkeepers for hours after the crime.

Reports said the police found Travis Reinking, 29, hiding at the back of a construction site located about a kilometre and half from the restaurant in Antioch in downtown Nashville where the shooting happened. The police said Reinking, who had fled the crime scene after a customer at the eatery snatched his weapon, surrendered without any resistance.

He was then taken to a hospital and later booked at the Hill Detention Center in Nashville on charges of criminal homicide.

The accused sought a lawyer and refused to speak, said Don Aaron, the spokesperson for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, according to a report in Chicago Tribune. However, the authorities remained tight-lipped on what made the suspect go for the carnage in the restaurant in the wee hours of Sunday or how he could fool the authorities during their massive manhunt.

Reinking was set to appear in the court on Wednesday, April 25.

The police said Reinking displayed signs of mental instability in the recent years and also had his firearms licence cancelled and his guns impounded by the authorities last year. He allegedly shot the people with one of the guns that the police had removed, reports in US media said.

Last year, Reinking was even arrested outside the White House after he tried to overcome a security barrier to meet US President Donald Trump calling himself a "sovereign citizen". He was under the scanner of the Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation and local authorities in Illinois where he lived then, since that incident.