After his arrest for the White House episode, Mr. Reinking, 29, who lived in Morton, Ill., was forced to surrender three rifles and a handgun to officials in August. Somehow he got them back — the authorities in Illinois said on Sunday that the circumstances were unclear — and in the fall, he moved to Nashville.

Image A photo provided by the Metro Nashville Police Department of the suspect, Travis Reinking, 29. Credit... Metro Nashville Police Department, via Getty Images

On Sunday, he pulled up to a Waffle House in the Antioch neighborhood of Nashville around 3:19 a.m., sat in his pickup truck for about four minutes and then opened fire, the police said.

Naked except for a green jacket, he then fled, and he remained at large as of Sunday night. The police said murder warrants were being drafted.

Don Aaron, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said at a news conference on Sunday that after leaving the restaurant, Mr. Reinking shed his jacket. In it were two magazines of AR-15 ammunition.

The police credited a customer with averting further bloodshed. The customer, James Shaw Jr., 29, seized the moment when he saw Mr. Reinking apparently trying to reload his rifle. Mr. Shaw burst out from behind a swinging door where he had been hiding, wrested the weapon away and threw it over a countertop.