A mass shooter killed three people in Jacksonville, Florida on Saturday, and police say the killer wrote racist manifestos before committing the attack.
Summary
A mass shooter killed three people in Jacksonville, Florida on Saturday, and police say the killer wrote racist manifestos before committing the attack.
- The perpetrator, who was white, wore a mask and attacked shoppers at a Dollar General store with a weapon decorated with a swastika. The Dollar General is located in New Town, a largely Black neighborhood of Jacksonville.
- The three victims were all Black people and were identified by police. Angela Michelle Carr, 52, was killed sitting in her black Kia after the gunman entered the Dollar General parking lot and fired 11 rounds into her car.
- Dollar General employee Anolt Joseph Laguerre, 19, was shot and killed after the shooter entered the store, and customer Jarrald De’Shaun Gallion was shot and killed shortly after. The shooter texted his father instruction to find his suicide note before shooting himself as police entered the store.
- The perpetrator, 21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter, wrote manifestos for his parents, the media, and law enforcement about his hatred for Black people. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said the writings made it clear “this shooting was racially motivated and he hated black people.”
- The shooter reportedly lived with his parents and purchased his guns legally. In 2017, he was briefly held under the state Baker Act law for involuntary commitment during a mental health episode.
- Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis returned to Florida from a campaign stop in Iowa on Sunday to attend a vigil for the victims. A few in the crowd booed DeSantis, but Jacksonville City Council Ju’Coby Pittman asked the hecklers to stop. “It ain’t about parties today,” Pittman said. “A bullet don’t know a party.”
- The New York Times observed the entire attack occurred in the space of “11 fatal minutes.” “We have three people who are dead because they are Black,” said State Senator Tracie Davis, a Democrat who represents Jacksonville. She continued, “Shopping. In our community. Gunned down. Because they were Black.”
- NBC News’ Daniel Arkin linked the Jacksonville killings to other hate-motivated mass shootings in recent years including the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the 2019 El Paso Walmart massacre, and the 2022 Buffalo supermarket mass shooting.
- CNN reported DeSantis called the gunman “a deranged scumbag,” in a statement from the state’s emergency operations center as he prepares the state for Tropical Storm Idalia. “Perpetrating violence of this kind is unacceptable,” DeSantis added. “And targeting people due to their race has no place in the state of Florida.”
- “Shortly before the shooting, Palmeter drove to nearby Edward Waters University, a historically Black university, where a security guard asked him for identification and then asked him to leave,” The Wall Street Journal reported, “School security quickly reported the incident to the police. Palmeter appeared in a TikTok video donning a bulletproof vest behind the school library, Waters said.”
- “This was, quite frankly, a maniac who decided he wanted to take lives,” Sheriff Waters said, according to the New York Post. “He targeted a certain group a people, and that’s black people, that’s what he said he wanted to kill. And that’s very clear.” He added, “The manifesto is, quite frankly, the diary of a madman.”
- Fox News covered the sheriff’s decision to release video footage of the gunman entering the Dollar General. Sheriff Waters said he “wanted the people to be able to see exactly what happened in this situation and just how sickening it is.”
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© Dominic Moore, 2023
