LEBANON, Pa. - She became a symbol of the gun-rights movement, but Meleanie Hain's reason for wanting to openly carry her Glock 26 everywhere she went, including her 5-year-old daughter's soccer game, was personal.

Hain, 31, worried that something awful would happen, and she wanted to protect her three children and herself.

On Wednesday night, in her house on East Grant Street, something awful did happen. Hain and her husband, Scott, 33, were found shot to death in an apparent murder-suicide.

Investigators would not say yesterday whether they had determined who pulled the trigger. But Aileen Fortna, who lives two doors down, said she saw the couple's children running down the street Wednesday night shouting, "Daddy shot Mommy."

The couple reportedly had been fighting. Scott Hain, a Berks County parole officer, left the house on Tuesday and returned on Wednesday. That afternoon, neighbors saw him mowing the lawn.

That was just hours before the Hains' children, ages 2, 6, and 10, ran screaming to a neighbor's house.

After that, people on the block described a scene that sounded more likely on a television crime show than on their leafy street of neat 11/2-story brick homes.

Police swarmed the block and evacuated neighbors. For about three hours, there appeared to be a stand-off between police and someone in the house, said Fortna, who with other neighbors watched from the end of the street.

"It looked like they were trying to talk to him, to call him," she said.

That was before officers went in and found the bodies.

The Hain children stayed overnight with a neighbor, who told Fortna yesterday morning that they had eaten breakfast and seemed OK.

Meleanie Hain's mother, Jenny Stanley, said she planned to see her grandchildren yesterday.

"I've lost my daughter and my best friend," she said through tears. "I'm devastated."

Police called Stanley about 7 p.m. Wednesday, she said, and her first thought was disbelief.

Because she did not yet know exactly what happened, she declined to discuss her son-in-law, who had a second job as a security guard at a community college. But she said that in the eight years she had known him, she had never seen him act violently.

It's been more than a year since Meleanie Hain made headlines by showing up at her daughter's preschool soccer game with her Glock semiautomatic strapped to her side, alarming other parents and leading Lebanon County Sheriff Mike DeLeo to revoke her concealed-carry permit.

Meleanie Hain sued and won and then sued the sheriff for allegedly violating her civil rights. That case is pending in federal court.

Her attorney, Matthew Weisberg, said that about four to six months ago, she told him that she and her husband had separated and that he should take her husband's name off the lawsuit.

Later, she mentioned to the lawyer that she was going to get a protective order against Scott Hain, though Weisberg said he did not know why. He said that when he spoke with her two weeks ago, she didn't mention any marital problems.

"It's a Shakespearean, ironic tragedy," Weisberg said yesterday. "The first irony is she was killed by a gun. The second irony is, she was fighting for the right to defend herself by carrying a gun, and she could not defend herself."

Con't.
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