On the day I met Dale Hausner, police were hunting for a serial shooter who had killed four people over the previous 10 months.

Of course, I did not know on April 12 that he was possibly involved. No one had a clue at that time who the "Serial Shooter" might be.

Looking back, I would like to be able to say that I had a premonition or some uneasy feeling when I interviewed Hausner for an innocuous story on the closing of Terminal 2 at Sky Harbor International Airport, but that would not be true. My memories of him, however, are vivid, which is surprising given such a brief encounter and the number of people a reporter interviews.

I was at Terminal 2 interviewing passengers and employees about the closure of this historic terminal. Hausner was a custodial worker there. He told me that Terminal 2 was special to him because it was where he and his family landed when they moved to Phoenix from Omaha. As a 5-year-old boy, it was his first impression of Arizona. He remembered stepping off the plane, walking down steps, crossing the tarmac in the torrid heat and then entering the cool of Terminal 2, which seemed huge to him.

He told me that he preferred working at Terminal 2 because the employees there were different. He liked the camaraderie. Terminal 2 was like a small town where everybody knew you and looked out for you, he said. More than anything, he explained that his co-workers understood that he had a young daughter who was seriously ill with a rare disease.

He was a single father and often would have to leave his job with no warning to take care of his daughter, he explained. He said he could have better shifts at the other terminals but that co-workers at Terminal 2 understood his situation with his daughter. He told me his two sons had died in a car accident and his daughter was all that he had. He proudly pulled a picture of his baby girl from his wallet to show me.

He told me that he worked several jobs to support his daughter. He was a boxing photographer, which struck me as interesting. We exchanged business cards. His business card had two boxing gloves on it.

At the time, I thought it a little strange that he had revealed so many details about his personal life to me. But I also thought that he probably was lonely and that he wanted someone to know that he was more than his job at Terminal 2.

My impression was that Hausner was a hard-working single father with a complicated and sad life. I did not know if what he had told me about his children was true, but I thought that, if even half the story was, it was tragic. Back at the newsroom, I told my editor maybe we could figure out a way to do a story on him and his daughter.

Now, Hausner is one of the men arrested in a shooting spree that included six horrific killings.

I feel that when I interviewed Hausner, I brushed against a hidden and frightening part of the world that I will never understand. I have gone over and over in my mind the details of our chance meeting, looking for clues.

We all want to believe that people accused of doing violent acts are different from us and that our inner compass will warn us of them.

That, of course, is not always true.