FBI: California festival killer a ‘loner,’ motive a mystery
GILROY >> The 19-year-old gunman who opened fire at a Northern California food festival was “kind of a loner” and much of his life was shrouded in mystery, an FBI official said as investigators searched for a motive.
Police believe Santino William Legan fired randomly Sunday, killing three people, after cutting through a fence to get into the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Officers patrolling the popular event responded within a minute and killed him.
Legan attended high school in Gilroy in his senior year and was recently
living in Nevada, where he purchased two guns — the AK-47-style semi-automatic
rifle he used in the attack and a shotgun that was found in his car near the festival, authorities said.
A bag of ammunition was found along a creek near the fence, police revealed Tuesday.
“We understand him to be kind of a loner,” said Craig Fair, deputy special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco Division. “People who act alone are exceptionally dangerous because they ... may not communicate their plans, intentions, mindset — they may not impart that on other people.”
Legan was living in an apartment in Walker Lake, a remote northern Nevada community, and had not had any run-ins with the law since moving there in the spring, Mineral County Sheriff Randy Adams said.
Officials searched the apartment, seizing empty shotgun and rifle boxes, a gas mask, empty ammunition boxes, pamphlets on guns and a sack full of ammunition casings, according to Nevada court records. There were a number of electronics, including three hard drives and thumb drives, as well as a letter “from Virginia to Santino.”
The FBI said they were looking through Legan’s social media, emails and phone to find out who he was talking to and what he was expressing and thinking. Authorities don’t believe he was targeting anyone based on any specific characteristics like race, but they’re still trying to determine his ideology, Fair said.
On the day of the attack, Legan urged his Instagram followers to read a 19th-century book popular with white supremacists on extremist websites. He also complained about overcrowding towns and paving open space to make room for “hordes” of Latinos and Silicon Valley whites.
Legan posted a photo from the festival minutes before opening fire, saying, “Come get wasted on overpriced” items. His since-deleted Instagram account says he is Italian and Iranian.