Guitar shop owner: Adkisson "nice" customer

He's the man at the center of a shocking crime, but one Anderson County shop owner said church shooting suspect Jim Adkisson seemed like any other customer.

Adkisson stands accused of opening fire in the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church Sunday morning, killing two people and injuring six others.

Just days before that, he was an ordinary customer who bought a guitar case, which police say he used to hide his gun.

For guitar store owner David West, the mystery began to unravel Wednesday afternoon, when a customer arrived at Claxton's Ciderville Music Store to sell a friend's guitar.

"When the guitar came in, the first thing we did was look up the serial number and call the Martin Company and found out who bought it, when he bought it, and what he paid for it, and all this," store owner West said. "Then, we started linking it together. It was the same name that was on television, and then we remembered him."

The friend of the man now selling a guitar was Jim Adkisson, who purchased a guitar from the store back in 2003.

When West realized the guitar was Adkisson's, he said he called authorities to get the permission to buy it. They gave him the OK.

In the midst of that sale, West said he and employees remembered Adkisson had stopped by the store on Friday.

"(He was) just like any other customer, just an ordinary customer," worker Faye West said.

"He was a ten, as far as being nice," David West said.

That Friday, David West said Adkisson bought a used guitar case for $35, even though workers warned him his Martin guitar wouldn't fit inside.

West said Adkisson told him he'd "make it fit."

West now believes Adkisson used the case to smuggle his gun into TVUU Sunday morning to carry out the deadly shooting.

"I guess, from now on, if somebody comes in and just buys a case, and they don't have a guitar or instrument and they say, 'I'll just take that one there,' I'll probably wonder what they're going to put in it from now on," he said.