Details emerge about shooter in Lehigh Acres murder-suicide

LEHIGH ACRES, Fla. Johnathan Jensen would step occasionally outside his home and randomly shoot his gun, neighbors said.

Last month, he fired the shots that killed himself, an 18-year-old Fort Myers High School student and her foster mother in a murder-suicide, the Lee County Sheriff’s Office said.

“The gunshots would go off in the middle of the night, usually,” neighbor John Harty said. “I don’t know if the police ever showed up, but nothing was ever done about it because he continued to do it.”

Police had plenty of contact with Jensen for other reasons.

In 2007, he was arrested after his wife told law enforcement he grabbed her neck during an argument. Last year, a man in a Wal-Mart parking lot told the sheriff’s office Jensen nearly ran him over and threatened him.

Still, much remains unclear about what led up to last month’s shooting. Heidi Shinn, the student Jensen is believed to have killed, wasn’t the only foster child who lived at his home Fourth Street Southwest.

Shinn was the only one under Jensen’s care when the shooting took place. But neighbors knew of other children who had lived there.

An open child protective investigation regarding at least two of the surviving children is underway, the Department of Children and Families said.

“I knew he wasn’t the best of neighbors, but I never thought he was harming his foster children because they were his meal tickets,” Harty said. “He had no other source of income outside of them, and why would he harm them?”