An Ohio man who would regularly jeer his ex-wife’s singing allegedly shot and killed her new boyfriend while the victim belted out a Linkin Park song at a karaoke bar.
Richard Lindgren, 59, allegedly shot 42-year-old Benjamin Hawk — who was in a relationship with Lindgren’s ex-wife — at Louie’s Corner House in Buckeye Lake, Ohio, just before midnight Friday, according to police and Hawk’s friends.
Hawk was just a few notes into Linkin Park’s “One More Light” when Lindgren pulled out a gun and shot him without any altercation beforehand, according to DJ Robert Humble, who told ABC 6 he was working at the bar that night and was just “four feet” from the shooting.
Lindgren had been married to Hawk’s girlfriend up until a few months ago — and would show up at local bars and “blurt out hateful words to his ex when she would get up to sing,” Humble claimed.
“He would call her names and bash her character. I recently had a talk with him two weeks prior and told him if he was going to act like that, he was not welcome,” he said.
Friends and family said Hawk was well known among the local karaoke community.
“He was using [karaoke] as a way to share his emotions with everybody else,” his brother David Hawk told The Columbus Dispatch.
A murder warrant for Lindgren’s arrest was issued immediately after the shooting, the Licking County Sheriff’s Office said.
He was taken into custody in South Carolina on Saturday, police said. Licking County authorities said they were working to have have extradited back to Ohio.
