"He didn't want anyone to get hurt but himself," Rebecca Duke told reporters. "The economy and the world just got the better of him."
On Tuesday night, her 56-year-old husband, Clay, snapped at the Panama City meeting captured on video. He pointed a gun at school board members as he delivered a rambling tirade about taxes and how his wife had been fired by the school board. He fired shots at Bay City School board chief Bill Husfelt but didn't hit the educator. Then, after a security guard shot him, Duke turned his gun on himself and took his own life.
Rebecca Duke said she knew that what her husband did was wrong, but she insisted he was a skilled marksman and must have intentionally missed Husfelt. Duke, who married her husband in 1999, said he was "tender and loving."
"Basically he loved me, he loved his family and he was just trying to get people [to] stop as he would say 'dump' on me and get me an answer so I could move on, so we could move on," she said.
Her hulking husband had become violent before. According to The Associated Press, Duke was convicted in 2000 of waiting in the woods for his ex-wife with a rifle, then shooting the tires of her car when she tried to escape. He was sentenced to five years in prison but was released in 2004. Rebecca Duke said her husband confronted his ex-wife because she "wouldn't leave them alone," according to AP.
Rebecca Duke, an elementary school teacher for children with special needs, was fired in late 2009 and said she wishes she had been able to find another job sooner so her husband wouldn't have worried so much. She said she had traveled to Lynn Haven, Fla., to apply for jobs when she heard about the attack and her husband's death.
"I was down here trying to fill out applications and trying to get in some interviews so that I could actually say 'Honey, guess what? I got a job ... everything is going to be OK,'" she told reporters tearfully. "Evidently I didn't get that chance, and I'm sorry about that because I love my husband. He was really a gentle giant."