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A White man armed with a high-powered rifle covered in swastikas killed three Black people after opening fire Saturday at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla., before fatally shooting himself, local law enforcement said, describing the attack as racially motivated.
“He targeted a certain group a people, and that’s Black people,” Jacksonville County Sheriff T.K. Waters (R) said at a news conference Saturday evening.
Two men and one woman were killed in the shooting, he said. Authorities have not publicly identified the gunman but said he was in his early 20s and fatally shot himself after law enforcement arrived at the scene. No other people suffered gunshot wounds, and the shooter is believed to have acted alone, Waters said.
The FBI’s Jacksonville office is investigating the shooting as a hate crime, the agency said in a statement posted to social media. Images provided by authorities of an AR-15-style rifle used in the shooting showed white swastikas drawn on the weapon.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Saturday night that his office was closely monitoring the situation and that he had spoken to Jacksonville’s mayor and national civil rights leaders. “Too many Americans — in Jacksonville and across our country — have lost a loved one because of racially motivated violence,” he said.
Waters said the shooter had left behind “several manifestos” in which he detailed his “disgusting ideology of hate.”
Those writings — one addressed to his parents, one to journalists and another to federal authorities — included many utterances of a slur for Black people and were the “words of a mad man,” Waters said in a televised interview on CNN.
The attack took place on the fifth anniversary of a shooting downtown at the Jacksonville Landing, a popular riverfront gathering place, where a man killed two people and injured 11 others during a 2018 video game tournament. Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan (D) said at the news conference that the shooter had alluded to the 2018 attack in his writings.
“I’m heartbroken,” she added. “This is a community that has suffered again and again. So many times this is where we end up. Perhaps [he] chose this date in alignment with that.”
Authorities said the gunman left his home Saturday around 11:39 a.m. in neighboring Clay County, where he is believed to have lived with his parents, and headed toward Jacksonville, a city of more than 970,000 people, about 30 percent of whom are Black.
Shortly after 1 p.m., the gunman — carrying an AR-15-style rifle and a Glock handgun, and wearing a tactical vest and a mask — entered the Dollar General store, the sheriff said. At 1:18 p.m., he texted his father and told him to check his computer, according to Waters.
After firing multiple rounds, the shooter turned the gun on himself, Waters said.
Members of his family called the Clay County Sheriff’s Office shortly before 2 p.m., he said, but by that time, “he had already begun shooting.”
State Rep. Kimberly Daniels (D), who represents the area in the Florida legislature and is a pastor at Rhema Way City Church, a few blocks from where the shooting took place, said the Dollar General store was a primary resource for the community.
“That’s our only store. We don’t have a Wal-Mart, we don’t have any other store,” she said. “People are in there all the time.”
Stores like Dollar General have become an increasingly important source for food and other goods for low- and middle-income Americans who live in so-called food deserts without access to grocery stores and farmers markets.
Daniels said people are especially hurting “because it was a hate crime.”
“I can usually calm people down,” she said, “but today they didn’t want to hear that. They’re disgusted.”
In a recorded video statement shared by his office, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) called the shooting “horrific” and a “cowardly act.”
“The shooting, based on the manifesto that they discovered from the scumbag that did this, was racially motivated,” said DeSantis, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination and was campaigning in Iowa on Saturday. “He was targeting people based on their race. That is totally unacceptable.”
President Biden has also been briefed on the shooting.
NAACP issues travel advisory, calling Florida ‘hostile’ to Black Americans
Far-right radicalism is the nation’s top domestic threat, according to the FBI, particularly in the category known as RMVE, racially motivated violent extremism, the agency’s catchall term for white-supremacist and neo-Nazi militants.
In many of the deadliest attacks, extremists who were radicalized in online communities took violent action alone, such as in a shooting last year targeting Black shoppers at a Buffalo grocery store. Hate trackers say that the trend underscores the need to counter racist propaganda fueled by baseless claims and that the propaganda is now showing up in mainstream political speech and right-wing media.
The Anti-Defamation League recorded more than 6,000 examples of white-supremacist activity in 2022, including in-person gatherings, “hateful laser projections” on buildings and stadiums, and the mass distribution of fliers and posters promoting hate, according to a report released in March. Florida was on the ADL’s list of the 10 states with the highest levels of white-supremacist activity.
In a travel advisory in May, the NAACP warned people of color against traveling to Florida, citing “aggressive attempts to erase Black history and to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in Florida schools,” which it said had turned Florida into an “openly hostile” state toward people of color.
“Tonight we are reminded why,” Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic Party, said in a statement in response to the Jacksonville shooting, referencing the NAACP’s warning.
According to Waters, the shooter was involved in a 2016 domestic violence call that did not result in an arrest. And in 2017, authorities responded to a mental health crisis involving the shooter in which he was subject to the Baker Act, Waters said, referencing a Florida law that enables families to provide emergency services and temporary detention for people who are impaired because of mental illness.
Edward Waters University, a historically Black university, said Saturday afternoon that a fatal shooting had occurred near the campus but that no students, faculty members or staff members appeared to be involved.
Asked on CNN whether there was an incident at the school, Waters said that there was “no altercation” at the university and that the gunman had probably stopped there to put on his mask and bulletproof vest before heading to the Dollar Store.
The university said later in a statement that the gunman had been found near the library on campus and was asked to leave after he refused to identify himself. He returned to his vehicle “without incident,” but the episode was reported to the sheriff’s office, the university said.
“This is a dark day in Jacksonville’s history,” Waters said at the news conference. “Any loss of life is tragic. But the hate that motivated the shooter’s killing spree adds an additional layer of heartbreak. There’s no place for hate in our community.”
Hannah Knowles, Lori Rozsa and Hannah Allam contributed to this report.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/08/26/jacksonville-shooting-dollar-general-florida/