FBI knew of Tallahassee gunman before attack
About three months before Scott P. Beierle shot two women to death, injured five other people and killed himself at Hot Yoga Tallahassee in November 2018, the FBI received a tip about him, the Tallahassee Police Department said Tuesday.
In August 2018, Beierle shared a link to his website “Path of Defiance” with a childhood friend and his wife, who was so disturbed by the content — it included songs about the rape and torture of women — that she shared it with the FBI. But according to police records, the bureau did not have enough information to pursue the lead.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The revelation that the bureau had been alerted to Beierle was among new details released by the Tallahassee Police Department at a news conference Tuesday afternoon announcing the findings of a three-month investigation. It found that Beierle had planned the attack for months and had an affinity for pornographic yoga and a documented disdain for the opposite sex.
Speaking at the news conference, Chief Michael DeLeo said that while Beierle had no known connection to any the six victims (five were female), he was “a disturbed individual who harbored hatred towards women.”
One of the documents recovered from a hotel room where Beierle had been staying said: “If I can’t find one decent female to live with, I will find many indecent females to die with. If they are intent on denying me life, I will have no choice, but to deny them life. At least I will no longer have to live under the reign of a monkey. America deserves a thousand 9/11s for this outrage.”
Beierle, a 40-year-old alumnus of Florida State University, had a history of sexual misconduct against women going back to grade school through his military career, and an equally long trail of misogynistic and racist content posted on the web, including songs he wrote and recorded about his frustrations and failures in life, love and work, according to the investigation.
The department interviewed dozens of people and combed through thousands of pages of documents, including journal entries and medical records.
In a video titled “Plight of the Adolescent Male,” which Beierle posted online four years before the attack, he invoked Elliot O. Rodger, the 22-year-old gunman who documented his rage against women for rejecting him before he killed six people, injured 14 others and took his own life in a 2014 rampage in Isla Vista, California. Both men identified as involuntary celibates.
The last song Beierle posted to his SoundCloud account included threatening lyrics to “put someone in a neck brace.”
Although Beierle had searched online for pornographic yoga content as well as locations and schedules of yoga studios in Tallahassee, the department concluded that there was no evidence he had specifically targeted any individual.
But DeLeo said it was likely that Beierle targeted a “familiar community” in Tallahassee, where records show he had been arrested at least twice, including separate cases in 2012 and 2016 in which he was accused of groping a woman.
Both of those cases were dismissed.
The department also obtained communications from 2013 between Beierle and a woman named Jennifer whom he had met online and who mentioned that she had attended a Hot Yoga class in Tallahassee. The relationship soured after Beierle sent her sexually suggestive messages, according to the police.
DeLeo said Beierle suffered severe financial stress because he had been fired at least twice from substitute teaching jobs and sought mental health counseling on a number of occasions.