MOTIVES SOUGHT FOR GUNMAN’S RAMPAGE GUNMAN’S RAMPAGE
Political passions can boil over into deadly action when combined with a personal loss or injury — a trigger investigators will be on the hunt for in piecing together the personal life of Virginia shooter and Bernie Sanders devotee James T. Hodgkinson, according to criminal behaviorists.
David Gomez, a veteran of the FBI’s profiling unit and senior fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, said it’s vital to find out if and when Hodgkinson took a personal hit that could be tied to his larger political grievances, such as losing health insurance or employment.
“You want to really look deep into that — was he personally affected by some change in the politics?” Gomez said, speculating such change could render Hodgkinson “personally angry at Republicans or Democrats or maybe Congress in general, and wanting to seek revenge for perceived slights, perceived anger, perceived harm.”
Hodgkinson, 66, a former home inspector, left an ample trail, both online and in his uprooting from Illinois to Virginia. He railed obsessively against the American tax rate and Republican tax policy on Facebook and in letters to the newspaper in his hometown, where he protested as a member of the “99 percent” movement.
“If I seem to be a broken record, it is because of the simple facts that need to be understood by everyone of voting age,” Hodgkinson wrote in August 2012 to the Belleville News-Democrat.
But his passion escalated to vitriol — he went from a May 2015 Facebook post saying Congressional Republicans “hate Americans & Should All be Voted Out of Office” to writing “It’s time to Destroy Trump & Co.” on March 22.
The escalation correlated to seeming upheaval in Hodgkinson’s personal life. In January, he dissolved his Illinois home appraisal and inspection business, records show.
And sometime in March, investigators said, Hodgkinson relocated to Alexandria, Va. There he lived out of his car and regularly loafed in the public lounge of a YMCA adjacent to the baseball field where he targeted congressional Republicans practicing for a charity game. A friend told the Herald Hodgkinson left his family behind in Belleville, Ill., for Virginia, with the expectation he’d eventually return.
Candice DeLong, a former FBI criminal profiler and host of the television show “Deadly Women” on Investigation Discovery, said Hodgkinson’s gradual isolation indicates he didn’t snap after a single incident, but as different points of stress in his life accumulated.
“He didn’t wake up yesterday morning and out of the blue decide to do this, he didn’t,” DeLong said. “This has to be thoughts that he’s been having. I think that is going to bear itself out for the next few days.
“There probably are, even if they don’t find them, mitigating factors in his life — stressors is another term for it — that contributed to his state of mind,” she said.
DeLong said Hodgkinson is against type when compared to other political assassins because of his advanced age and apparent lack of delusions, characteristics of the men who shot President Reagan and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
“What it does is reinforce my belief that there was a confluence of events that led to this point — and it didn’t happen yesterday morning and it probably was more than one thing,” DeLong said.
People Hodgkinson ran into in Alexandria told the Washington Post yesterday he was withdrawn, unpleasant, and often seemed to be staring off into space. Bill Euille, a former mayor of Alexandria, told the paper he’d struck up a rapport with Hodgkinson at the Y, and once offered to help him find a job when he realized he was carrying most of what he owned in a gym bag.
James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and author of “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder,” said it can be difficult to judge who is capable of violence amidst the noise of hyper-partisan online arguing.
“There’s very, very few who would actually translate that into some aggressive act,” Fox said. “And there’s no way to figure out who will versus who won’t.”