Editing Kevin Janson Neal (section)

==Background==
Kevin Janson Neal was raised in Cary, North Carolina. He attended East Carolina University from August 2001 to May 2004 but did not qualify for a degree and never declared a major. Relatives said Neal, who moved to California in 2005, had a history of mental illness and anger management issues, as well as an obsession with conspiracy theories. His mother had reportedly noticed a decline in his mental health since 2016.

Neighbors complained to police about Neal firing guns from his property, but whenever sheriff's deputies visited his doorstep, Neal would not respond to their knocking. A neighbor later said he believed Neal might have been testing the response time of law enforcement. In total, deputies were called to Neal's Bobcat Lane home 21 times for various reasons in 2016 and 2017.

On January 31, 2017, Neal was arrested and charged with two felonies, and five misdemeanors, after stabbing neighbor Hailey Poland, assaulting her mother-in-law, and snatching a mobile phone away from them. He was held on a US$160,000 bail bond, which was posted by his mother. His mother also spent $10,000 on legal fees to secure his release. Following his release, Neal continued to harass the neighbors, causing them to successfully seek a restraining order that required him to surrender his firearms and not purchase additional guns. He handed over a single pistol and attested that he had no other guns. Police said that, despite this, he illegally manufactured the guns he used in the shootings. Ghost guns are currently legal to manufacture in California, but the terms of Neal's restraining order made it illegal for him to possess them, or any other guns. Since January 31<sup>st</sup>, 2018, ghost guns require a serial number in California. The two handguns that Neal possessed during his shooting rampage were not registered to him.

The day before the shootings, Neal called his mother to tell her he was "fed up" with his neighbors, whom he suspected of making methamphetamine. He had previously attempted to report his neighbors to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. One of the neighbors involved in the January 31 incident later became one of those killed in the shootings. Although Danny Elliott had meth in his system when Neal killed him and had been put on probation in 2016 for a misdemeanor charge of possessing drug paraphernalia, sheriff's deputies and California Fire officials said they never found evidence of a meth operation, despite multiple visits to Bobcat Lane.