Montville — The man killed outside the Chesterfield Lodge Sunday had been living at the motel for nearly two months, fought with the owner that afternoon over a $250 bill, and was arrested at Mohegan Sun three weeks ago after allegedly making 18 threatening phone calls in less than half an hour.

The owner of the Chesterfield Lodge said the man, Val Thomas, 53, refused to pay the bill for his room on Sunday, so he called police to resolve the issue.

“He didn’t want to pay me,” said Sam Patel, who owns the motel and the adjoining liquor store at the corner of Route 85 and Grassy Hill Road.

Patel said he called police and went into his office just before 2:30 p.m. Sunday. He was still there when he heard a gunshot, he said.

When police arrived and asked the man to leave, there was “brief but violent” struggle, according to state police.

The man took an officer’s Taser and began hitting the officer in the head with it, police said, and an officer shot the man at least once. He was pronounced dead at The William W. Backus Hospital.

Police did not say on Monday how many officers responded to the motel and didn't identify either Thomas or the officer who shot him.

The wounded Montville officer was taken to Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, where several staples were used to close a laceration to the officer's head.

State police and the Windham County State’s Attorney’s Office are investigating the incident, which is routine in any shooting involving a police officer. The state's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said it was not ready Monday to release results of an autopsy for Thomas.

On Monday morning, the day after police spent several hours combing the parking lot for evidence and investigating the shooting, another guest at the motel was cleaning out the dead man’s room.

The man, who declined to give his name, loaded armfuls of garbage, papers, clothes and food into his pickup truck. Patel had asked him to clean out Thomas’ room on Monday morning, he said.

The room, messy and smelling strongly of cigarette smoke, had been Val Thomas’ home for at least the past six weeks.

A small shelf held canned food and cereal by the door, and a bunch of slightly green bananas sat on a table by the bed. A large Bible looked like it would soon slide off the pile of clothes on the floor. The dresser was littered with food wrappers and papers, sweaters and boxes of incense.

Talking quickly into a cell phone, the man charged with cleaning the room paced in and out of the doorway. He lifted the box for a board game, National Geographic Global Pursuit, into his pickup truck.

“Into the dumpster it goes,” the man said.

On another trip, he piled in several sheets of graph paper with numbers and colorful dots arranged in a spiral pattern. There was a brochure about Christianity titled “Welcome to the Family,” written by the televangelist Kenneth Copeland. And a note, written to Thomas by the pastor of a local church, thanking Thomas for doing work on the church grounds.

“Your willingness to tackle the bamboo was such an answer to our prayer!” the note said.

The pastor who wrote the note — Tom Greely, of Apostolic Lighthouse United Pentecostal Church — said Monday that he remembered Thomas.

He attended the church weekly, coming to services by himself for about a year and occasionally shoveling snow or doing landscaping work, until disagreements over religious doctrine and arguments with other churchgoers drove them apart.

“He was a very good worker,” Greely said. “But he did get in conflict even with some of the people at the church.”

Greely said Thomas had made it clear he didn’t believe in the church’s doctrine, specifically the Pentecostal belief in Jesus Christ as a personal Lord and Savior.

“I think he enjoyed our music, I think he enjoyed fellowshipping with the people,” Greely said. “He never really did agree with our doctrinal teachings ... as best I know he did not consider himself to be a Christian.”

Greely said he invited Thomas to his home for dinner several times, where Greely and his wife discussed Pentecostal doctrine with him.

“He was a strange character,” Greely said. “I didn’t think of him as dangerous.”

According to a court decision published to the New York state courts website in 2010, Thomas was convicted in an Ulster County, New York court of assault, criminal mischief and resisting arrest in 2007.

Thomas had fought with several police and correctional officers and damaged a police vehicle and was indicted on multiple counts between November 2003 and March 2004.

An Ulster County court committed him to a psychiatric facility and labeled him an “incapacitated person.” But the court reversed that decision after a hearing in 2007, finding him competent to stand trial. A jury convicted him of second-degree assault, criminal mischief and resisting arrest, and the court sentenced him to 4 1/2 years in prison, with five years of supervision after his release.

Thomas appealed the decision in 2010, arguing that he was improperly denied the right to represent himself in the trial. He wanted to defend himself, he said, because his attorneys would not acknowledge that he was "the legitimate King of the United States" and "Almighty God," among other reasons.

He also told the court that his birthday, in May 1963, was "one of the only two days in our lifetimes in which the Earth spun backwards, with the sun rising in the West and setting in the East."

The court denied his appeal.

Thomas had at least one recent run-in with the law in Connecticut.

Mohegan Tribal Police arrested Thomas on Jan. 9, after police said he called the Citizens Bank branch at Mohegan Sun 18 times in less than half an hour that afternoon, threatening to “burn” the employees and using a racial slur multiple times.

According to a prosecutor’s report written by a Mohegan Tribal Police officer, Thomas called the bank and cursed at several difference employees, saying “I’ll burn your black bridges, your white crowns and their black bridges,” among other threats.

Police connected the telephone number for the calls to Thomas, and found his photograph and criminal history in New York. They tracked his cell phone to find Thomas playing poker in the casino, where he told the officer that bank employees had “pissed me off” and admitted to making the calls.

Police charged him with second-degree breach of peace and second-degree threatening.

At the Chesterfield Lodge Monday, when the truck was full, the man with the pickup truck drove to the other side of the motel's parking lot and threw Thomas’ belongings into a dumpster.

m.shanahan@theday.com