Motives of US shooters probed
FBI: INVESTIGATIONS INTO MEN’S BACKGROUNDS
31 people killed in two mass shootings in the past week.
One was fuelled by racist hatred of immigrants and warned of a “Hispanic invasion”. The other’s motives are less clear but he apparently resented women and compiled a “hit list” of girls in high school.
Police and the FBI were this week trying to piece together what drove two young American men to commit unspeakable acts of carnage over the weekend.
Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old unemployed white man from the Dallas suburb of Allen, opened fire with a semiautomatic weapon at a Walmart on Saturday in El Paso, Texas.
About 20 minutes before the rampage, which left 22 people dead, he posted a four-page white
supremacist “manifesto” on the online forum, 8chan, that railed against Hispanics.
In the document entitled The Inconvenient Truth, Crusius wrote that the attack “is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”.
Crusius claimed he was “defending” the United States “from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion” and made references to the Christchurch shootings in New Zealand, where a white gunman killed 51 worshippers at two mosques in March.
El Paso police chief Greg Allen said Crusius has not shown any remorse since his arrest and “appears to be in a state of shock and confusion”.
According to court documents, Crusius has been unemployed for the past five months and living with his grandparents.
According to CNN, a Twitter account linked to Crusius frequently shared tweets by President Donald Trump. He also “liked” a photo of Trump’s name spelled out with guns.
The motivations of the other gunman, Connor Betts, 24, are less clear but several former friends told US media that he had a history of disturbing behaviour, particularly towards women. Also armed with a semiautomatic weapon, Betts killed nine people including his sister, Megan Betts, 22, in Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday morning. He was shot dead by police within a minute.
FBI agent Todd Wickerham said Betts had been exploring “violent ideologies” but declined to provide any details on what they were.
“We have found specific violent ideologies that the shooter followed,” Wickerham said.
Betts was white and six of his nine victims were black. But Wickerham said investigators had found no evidence that the attack was racially motivated. – AFP
He appears to be in a state of shock