Signs of Distress Multiplied on Killer's Path to Navy Yard In the days before Aaron Alexis called the police in Newport, R.I., to complain that he was hearing voices sent by a "microwave machine," employees at the Residence Inn in nearby Middletown were struggling to cope with his behavior. Courtesy Kristi Suthamtewakul, via Associated Press Aaron Alexis in an undated photo. Daily logs kept by the hotel detailed how on successive nights, he knocked on doors to find the voices, woke up a person in one room and frightened another so badly she asked to move. Then came a call from his employer. "Brenda from The Experts Inc. called re: Mr. Alexis in 407," a Residence Inn employee noted in a log dated Aug. 7 that was reviewed by The New York Times. "She explained that he is unstable and the company is bringing him home," the entry continued. She asked me to check the room (it was vacant), and check him out. The call from the company, placed six weeks before Mr. Alexis, a former Navy reservist who the police say shot and killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard, suggests it had deep concerns about his state of mind and raises questions about why he continued to be sent to Navy bases in different states to work on their computer systems. Company officials have said that although they knew Mr. Alexis was complaining about voices, they believed he was saying that the hotel was too noisy. The company did not respond immediately to requests for comment on Thursday. It was one of numerous occasions in the weeks just before the shootings on Monday when Mr. Alexis" increasingly bizarre behavior was noted by others, including hotel employees, guards at a Virginia airport and the police in Newport. Yet no one managed to head off the violence. Much remains unknown about Mr. Alexis" life and what drove his actions, gaps that are likely to remain at least partly unfilled with his fatal shooting by police officers at the navy yard. But as details emerge, they suggest a man engaged in an intense internal struggle for control, a battle he ultimately lost. And like other mass killers before him - James E. Holmes in Colorado, Jared L. Loughner in Arizona, Seung-Hui Cho in Virginia - he left a trail of telltale signs that were minimized, misinterpreted or ignored. In many ways, Mr. Alexis, 34, seemed a jumble of contradictions. In Fort Worth, where he spent years in the Navy Reserve, he was described as friendly and sociable, drinking Heineken at bars with co-workers and chatting with customers at the Thai restaurant Happy Bowl, where he worked for a time. But he also held a piece of himself apart. "He would kind of close into himself," said Melinda Downs, who knew him in Fort Worth and served as a motherly figure in his life. He didn't let a whole bunch of people in, because he'd been hurt. He handled himself carefully. Like others, Ms. Downs recalled Mr. Alexis as "sweet" and often "playful." But he also had outbursts of rage, some extreme; he told the police in Seattle in 2004 that he shot out the tires of a construction worker's car in an anger-fueled "blackout." And co-workers at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York described him as a person who held on to grudges and did not tolerate fools gladly. Perhaps in an effort to keep his more violent emotions in check, Mr. Alexis practiced Theravada Buddhism, meditating for hours on the thick rugs of a temple in White Settlement, the suburb west of Fort Worth where he lived on and off for three years. He told one man affiliated with the temple that he aspired to be a monk, but he would stay up late at night playing violent video games in his room. Mr. Alexis, a computer specialist who led an itinerant life, traveling to naval installations around the country to service their systems, seemed aware of his emotional problems, telling friends he suffered from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. But it is not clear whether he ever sought mental health treatment. Visiting an emergency room at a veterans" medical center in August, he said only that he was having trouble sleeping, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Reporting was contributed by Trip Gabriel, Joe Goldstein and Michael S. Schmidt from Washington; Lauren D'Avolio from Fort Worth; Nate Schweber from New York; Kirk Johnson from Seattle and Kim Severson from Atlanta.