When a gunman opened fire at a country-club restaurant in New Hampshire on Saturday night, patrons did their best to intervene and stop him, the authorities said — and it cost one man his life.
That man, Robert DeCesare Jr., was fatally shot while trying to protect his family, his mother, Evie O’Rourke, said on Monday.
Mr. DeCesare had been eating dinner with his wife and daughter at the Sky Meadow Country Club in Nashua, N.H., when the gunfire started. Ms. O’Rourke said the two women saw Mr. DeCesare move toward the gunman and then fall to the ground.
When she heard the initial news reports about the shooting, Ms. O’Rourke said, “we never, ever imagined that when they said one man was killed, that one man was my son.”
The police arrested a suspect shortly after the shooting. The suspect, Hunter Nadeau, 23, was arraigned in Nashua on Monday afternoon and charged with second-degree murder. He is being held without bail.
John Formella, New Hampshire’s attorney general, said at a news conference Sunday that guests at the restaurant had “put aside care for their own safety and worked to intervene and stop the shooter, and keep this a much more contained event than it may otherwise have been.” He said the shooting had lasted less than a minute.
Two people were wounded in the shooting. One, an employee of the country club, was airlifted to a hospital in Massachusetts and was in stable condition as of Monday afternoon, according to a spokesman for Mr. Formella. The spokesman did not provide any detail on the condition of other wounded person, who was a patron at the restaurant. The authorities said four more people suffered injuries that were not gunfire-related.
There was no known connection between Mr. Nadeau and Mr. DeCesare, the police said.
Mr. Nadeau attended his arraignment hearing on Monday remotely from the Hillsborough County Jail in Manchester, N.H. It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Nadeau had a lawyer. Efforts to reach his family have been unsuccessful.
Mr. DeCesare, 59, was a father of three. He worked in sales in Massachusetts and had recently sold his house and moved to a condominium at the Sky Meadow complex in Nashua, which Ms. O’Rourke said had been his dream.
He had been learning to play pickleball and had recently booked a cruise with his wife for their wedding anniversary, Ms. O’Rourke said. “You could find him in the dictionary under ‘great guy,’” she added.
Rob Parsons, the owner of the Sky Meadow Country Club, said in a statement that he was “heartbroken” over the shooting and called Mr. DeCesare a hero.
“Sky Meadow and the City of Nashua are safe, tight-knit communities, built on fellowship, compassion and resilience,” Mr. Parsons said. “Those values have been on full display in the thousands of messages of support we have received since this horrific incident began unfolding.”
Charlene DeCesare, Mr. DeCesare’s wife, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.
She said in a statement to WCVB, an ABC-affiliated TV station in Boston, that “you’d be hard pressed to find a man more loved, not only by his family but by his many groups of friends from golf, poker and pickleball.”
Sonia A. Rao reports on disability issues as a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for early-career journalists.
Jacey Fortin covers a wide range of subjects for The Times, including extreme weather, court cases and state politics across the country.
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