Bar still bears marks of shooter

The Special K Pub & Grill is still wounded.

Drinks rest on the bullet hole left in the bar after Robert Frazier, then 69, shot at a glass held in a friend’s hand. A few feet away, above the pull-tab boxes, another bullet hole serves as a reminder of the last free morning Frazier has spent since March 3, 2006, when he commandeered an STA bus and fired at friends in his second home at the Special K.

“Everyone around here still wonders about him,” said Tyrene Mellon, the daytime bartender at the Special K who helped wrestle a chrome .25-caliber handgun away from Frazier, who was dying of cancer. “Of course, everybody has their theories, too.”

The official story, which Frazier supplied when he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and assault charges last year, was that about 9:30 a.m. on a Friday, Frazier tapped on the glass doors of an empty STA bus and showed the driver a gun, telling him to take him to North Market Street.

Along the way, the driver activated an emergency signal in the bus, changing its destination sign to “Call Police.” Frazier got out near the Special K and walked in to find Mellon and another patron having a morning drink.

Frazier, who was being treated for cancer at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, walked up to the bar and told the other man to leave. When he refused, Frazier shot at the glass in the man’s hand, then spun and fired toward Mellon. The two took the gun from Frazier, who went back outside to find police officers waiting for him.

Frazier did not have an excuse to offer to prosecutors, who filed kidnapping and assault charges. He pleaded guilty and, in such ill health that he required a wheelchair at his sentencing, was ordered to spend 25 months in jail. He could not be reached for an interview.

Frazier was told by state officials not to contact Mellon, but the bartender said she often wonders how the former regular is doing.

“He’s a good person,” she said. “I kind of became a big sister to him.”

Before the shooting, Mellon was there – with others from the bar – to help Frazier move into a downtown apartment after a bitter divorce left him sleeping in the Special K trash bin. She bought him a TV as a move-in gift.

Frazier had been in a downward spiral for a few months before he shot up the Special K, Mellon said. Frazier went broke through the divorce, and his cancer grew worse. When talking to police after the incident, Frazier told them, “I’m as good as dead, anyway.”

“He didn’t come in here to hurt anybody else,” Mellon said. “He just didn’t know what to do.”

Frazier is a candidate for early release from Airway Heights Corrections Center in July, according to state officials. When he gets out, Mellon said she looks forward to talking to him again.