Video screen capture of Clay Duke pointing a gun at Bay District School Board members just before he ordered the boardroom to be cleared Tuesday. 
 
 PANAMA CITY — Clay Duke showed signs of the mental illness that may have led him to his death years before he walked into a Bay County School Board meeting Tuesday, opened fire and ultimately killed himself, family members said. 
 
 “We knew he was upset,” said Amanda Crowder, niece of Duke’s wife, Rebecca. She said Wednesday the family didn’t know he might be suicidal. “This is something we definitely didn’t expect to have happen.” 
 
 Duke fired several shots at school district leaders before he was shot by the district’s safety director, Mike Jones. 
 
 “The economy and the world just got the better of him,” Rebecca Duke said. 
 
 She said Duke felt alienated from society and was distraught over Rebecca Duke’s firing from the school district, where she worked with special needs children before she was dismissed after a 97-day probationary period, according to district Human Relations Director Tommye Lou Richardson. 
 
 “All I know is they were broke,” Crowder said. “He loved his wife so much he couldn’t rationalize what was going on in his head.” 
 
 It’s been almost a year since Rebecca Duke was fired, and since then Clay Duke’s anger and alienation “rumbled and grumbled inside of him until he just couldn’t take it anymore,” Crowder said. 
 
 The Dukes would spend a lot of time apart, Crowder said, with Rebecca spending the weekdays in Lynn Haven with her mother looking for work and Clay at the home the couple owned in Alford. 
 
 That alienation was evident on a Facebook page that apparently belonged to Duke. It showed the same red-circled “V” he spray painted on the wall in the meeting room before the shooting, as well as quotations about class warfare. 
 
 But it wasn’t the first time Duke had been suicidal. 
 
 “He went Y2K crazy,” said Ben Bollinger, the attorney who represented Duke after he was arrested for aggravated stalking of his ex-wife more than 10 years ago. 
 
 In October 1999, years after Duke and Anita Smart divorced, and six months after Duke had remarried to Rebecca Crowder, Duke showed up at Smart’s home with two handguns wearing a mask and a bulletproof vest, according an arrest affidavit. He threatened to kill Smart and she tried to leave, so he shot out a tire on her vehicle. 
 
 Duke said he’d been watching Smart for six months and told her details of her personal life to prove it. She’d seen him parked outside her home in April of that year. A tree in her yard had been vandalized in June. Duke was going to kill her and several other people before he killed himself, he said. 
 
 Smart could not be reached to comment Wednesday, but a family member who spoke on the condition of anonymity said she had a “premonition” about Duke when she met him briefly in Pennsylvania while Anita was in college. 
 
 “It was 15 years ago that I met him and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him,” the woman said. 
 
 Bollinger filed a notice with the court that he intended to prove Duke had been stricken with a “mania” associated with Y2K, but Duke eventually pleaded no contest to several felony charges and served five years in prison. He received treatment and took medication in prison for what he told Judge Dedee Costello was adult-onset bipolar disorder in a letter last year. 
 
 In that letter, Duke asked for early termination of his probation, which was part of his sentencing agreement. He hadn’t had any legal problems since being released from prison, so in February 2010, Judge Michael Overstreet granted Duke’s request. 
 
 Bollinger said Duke’s mental illness resulted in discharge from the military at some point before his arrest, but that could not be confirmed. The News Herald has filed a request for Duke’s military service folder under the Freedom of Information Act. 
 
 At some point, Duke prepaid for his eventual cremation, Crowder said. 
 
 When Crowder last saw Duke at Thanksgiving, “he carved our ‘roast beast,’ as he said it,” and hugged Crowder a little tighter than usual. 
 
 “I wish I would have known that was the last time I was going to see him,” Crowder said. 
 
 The Associated Press contributed to this report. ||||| Sponsored Links 
 
 (Dec. 16) -- Weeping hero security guard Mike Jones said today he feared he'd failed his Florida school board colleagues when a gunman opened fire during a public meeting."I thought I'd let them down when he started shooting," Jones said in an emotional news conference in Panama City, Fla., where Tuesday's videotaped rampage by Clay Duke, 56, took place.Duke, an ex-convict with mental problems, shot several rounds directly at Bay City Schools Superintendent Bill Husfelt and others, but missed. Leveling a 9 mm handgun at the board, Duke said he was angry because the school district had fired his wife.She was later identified as former teacher Rebecca Duke, who called her husband a " gentle giant " who she thinks missed his targets on purpose. "He didn't want anyone to get hurt but himself," she told reporters Wednesday. Police said they had found evidence at Duke's home that showed he'd been planning the attack for some time. He arrived with two full clips of ammunition.Jones said he'd been in the building only five minutes when he heard shots being fired. The security guard, a former police officer with 20 years' experience, said he ran to the meeting room. "I opened the door with one hand and was firing with the other hand," he told reporters in his first public comments since the shootout.At least 14 shots were fired before Duke fatally shot himself in the head. He had been wounded at least once by Jones. Police called the security guard a hero and said he'd saved the lives of board members.Jones said he was just doing his job. "I'm not a hero, folks," he said. "I don't know how I survived with all those shots fired."Jones was not in camera view when he shot at Duke. The guard said he was sure Husfelt had been hit. "When the superintendent came up from behind that counter and [board attorney] Franklin Harrison came up and hugged my neck, that's when I lost it like I'm losing it now," Jones said, breaking down. "It was like seeing a newborn baby for the first time."Jones said he spent most of Wednesday praying with his pastor. "I just wanted to get right with God about this," he said. "I've taken somebody's life. ... Honestly, I shot the man ... I thought I was going to jail."
– When distraught ex-con Clay Duke took a school board meeting hostage on Tuesday, it was security guard Mike Jones who saved the day, shooting and wounding Duke, who then killed himself. But Jones says he was only doing his job. “I’m not a hero folks,” he said at a news conference today. Jones wept as he recounted the incident, according to Aol News. Jones had been in the building only five minutes when he heard shots fired. “I thought I'd let them down,” he said. “I opened the door with one hand and was firing with the other. … I don’t know how I survived with all those shots fired.” Relatives of Duke, meanwhile, tell the Panama City News Herald that though the incident came as a shock, they’d seen signs Duke was unraveling. “The economy and the world just got the better of him,” his wife said.