Judge's slain mother remembered at funeral

Neighbors said Ross, who changed his name from Bartlomiej Ciszewski after he emigrated from Poland in 1982, lived alone with his dog and kept to himself. They described him as intelligent but increasingly angry as his legal fight over his treatment for mouth cancer repeatedly failed.

Other judges listed
After Ross’s suicide, federal marshals also began calling judges named in a letter found in his van.

Authorities said they didn’t know why Ross was in the Milwaukee area on Wednesday. Two federal appeals court judges who upheld dismissals of his lawsuits have offices in Milwaukee. One of those, Terence Evans, said marshals called at 3 a.m. to inform him of the situation.

Scott Olson / Getty Images Investigators in the Lefkow murders continued their search for evidence Thursday shortly before police announced they believe Bart Ross was the killer.

Ross was issued a parking ticket just before 2 p.m. Wednesday about five blocks from the Milwaukee federal courthouse where the two judges have offices, the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported Friday.

Around the same time, courthouse security saw Ross walking around the building, the Sun-Times reported, citing unidentified sources.

Federal Judge David Coar, who also dismissed a Ross lawsuit, was working out in a gym at 6 a.m. when his wife called to say the marshals had telephoned with the news.

“I don’t think security is adequate and I never have thought security is adequate,” Coar said. Two other federal judges in Chicago said the same in the wake of the shootings.

In the lawsuit Lefkow dismissed, Ross said his cancer treatments had disfigured his face and caused his teeth to fall out. He accused four doctors of committing “a terrorist act” in giving him radiation therapy.

Ross compared his radiation and surgery with the experiments Nazi doctors performed in concentration camps, demanded the impeachment of judges who had ruled against him, and asked for $250 million in damages from the federal government alone.

'He became more angry'
“As his legal remedies were becoming fewer, as he had less success, he became more angry, more agitated,” said lawyer Thomas Browne, who represented an attorney Ross was suing.

More setbacks came in the last two months as the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Lefkow’s decision to dismiss his latest lawsuit and his landlady began proceedings to evict him from the home he once owned and was now forced to rent.

A hearing in the eviction case had been scheduled for Thursday.

“He became obsessed" with the lawsuit, said Don Rose, a political consultant who met Ross when he did electrical work on a friend’s house. “His health was deteriorating, his money was going away, he couldn’t make any headway in the legal system.”

Rose said he never expected Ross could be violent, but says when he first heard his name on Thursday connected to Lefkow and the murders, “it all fell in place, it all fit together. ... When she dismissed the case, that was like a death sentence.”

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