Indiana Mall Gunman Appears to Have Posted Plans on 4chan
Police have told VICE News they are familiar with the posts and are investigating.
Hours before a 20-year-old gunman opened fire on a food court in a suburban mall near Indianapolis on Sunday, he appears to have posted a grim message on the notorious imageboard site 4chan.
“Name is jonathan and today seems like a good day to die,” he wrote. The post was accompanied by a colorized image of a wedding in Nazi Germany. He also shared a link to the image-hosting site Imgur, which contained several images of himself wearing a white button-down shirt, blue jeans, a face-covering, and posing with two AR-15-style rifles, a handgun, and multiple magazines.
That post was shared on July 17 at 1:13 p.m. (the site lists no time zone) to the website’s /BANT board—which is its International/Random board. Just before 6 p.m. local time the gunman, identified as Jonathan Sapirman, walked out of the Greenwood Park Mall’s food court restrooms armed with the same type and number of weapons as seen in the photo and began shooting into the crowd with an assault rifle (specifically, a Sig Sauer model M400 5.56). He killed three people and injured two more. Less than 30 seconds after his rampage began, a civilian shot him dead from over 40 yards away with a handgun.
Police have not yet identified any clear motive in the attack. At a press conference Monday, they said the shooter had left his laptop in a heated oven, alongside a can of butane, and submerged his cellphone in the toilet. Police did not speculate on the reasons the shooter did this but said investigators were trying to acquire as much information from the damaged devices as they could. The FBI took the damaged laptop to their lab in Quantico for further analysis. Police told VICE News that they were familiar with the comments and images purportedly posted by the gunman prior to the attack.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzxba/indiana-mall-gunman-4chan