Here’s what Allen mass shooter posted on social media, and why it didn’t prevent attack

The man who killed eight people and wounded seven others at the Allen Premium Outlets on May 6 posted speeches, a manifesto, and photos and rants glorifying mass shootings, white supremacy and Nazism on a Russian social media site for months leading up to the attack.

Much of what the 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia wrote and shared on social media was similar to ideologies and beliefs shared by other mass shooters in recent years, from racism, misogyny and neo-Nazi ideation to talk about being an “incel” and expressions that he was better off as a loner.

The younger a mass shooter is, the more likely it is law enforcement will find significant details on the shooter’s ideology and even explanations of their plans, University of North Texas criminology lecturer Robert Wall told the Star-Telegram. The Allen shooter’s social media presence, which Wall described as “massive,” isn’t as common.

But its use to law enforcement in preventing an actual mass shooting is limited.

“It’s so often on the media (companies that own social platforms) to form an algorithm to prevent that beforehand,” Wall said. “You’re trying to isolate what is a common but uncommon occurrence. Mass shootings are a small portion of all the shootings. They’re horrific when they occur, but it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack trying to look for and predict a mass shooter just before they’re about to be involved in a mass shooting.”

With social media sites operated in America, the number of posts moderators see every day can make it next to impossible to identify patterns and people who are a high risk for committing mass shootings, especially when the posts can be made across multiple platforms or accounts. When looking at the broader internet, with chat rooms and foreign social media networks like Odnoklassniki, the Russian platform the Allen shooter used, warning signs on social media become even harder to detect because the platforms don’t have to adhere to American laws or follow industry standards in the U.S.

There are still things law enforcement can learn after the fact that, given time, can be helpful in identifying high-risk individuals, Wall said.

Screenshots of the Russian social media account used by Garcia seem to indicate he planned the mass shooting for months. They included written speeches where he espoused racist, homophobic, neo-Nazi and other bigoted ideologies and links to a YouTube channel that appeared to belong to the gunman.

The Star-Telegram attempted unsuccessfully several times to create an account on the Russian social media site to independently review the account.

On the account, Mauricio Garcia posted photos that appeared to be from trips to the mall during which he scouted the location, and screenshots of its Google profile, including estimates of the busiest times at the mall. The shooting happened around those busiest times on a Saturday afternoon.

According to the screenshots of his social media account, Garcia also posted photos taken from other websites of Latino people dressed in Nazi attire at weddings and social gatherings and doing the Nazi salute, which he captioned, “My kinda people.”

He also posted a handwritten encrypted message and wrote that he wouldn’t give any hints and shared photos of his tattoos and their prices, including a swastika, the Nazi SS symbol, the City of Dallas logo and the Fort Worth panther.

He created a playlist on his YouTube account, which has been taken down by moderators but archived on third-party websites, that included music with mass shooter themes and scenes from movies and skits that showed a mass shooting or a school shooter. He also added to the playlist and to his favorites some YouTube videos of mass murderers being interrogated.

The gunman also praised other mass shooters, referred to mass murder as “an art” and “a sport” and accused Americans who react with anger, horror or indignation of faking under social pressure.

“Every school shooting, to me, is the perfect time to be a completely horrible person and see the event like a sport or comedy,” Garcia wrote on his social media profile. “There is always humor in darkness.”

In some instances, it seemed the shooter was trying to sound profound or philosophical.

Memes on his profile included one that suggested white supremacy was a natural belief for Latino Americans to embrace.

Garcia also embraced ideas relating to “incels,” or involuntary celibate, a fringe internet subculture that espouses an appearance-based hierarchy, that women are too sexually selective, anti-feminist views, the objectification of women and a belief that men are entitled to sex. References to incels appeared to be routinely interwoven with his posts about mass shootings and other racist, homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic ideologies.

The shooter also wrote about how coworkers would tell him he looked like a mass shooter and that he looked “like the type to walk into a crowd and start shooting.” He also claimed coworkers asked him to “spare me” if Garcia was ever to “come in here and snap” or to warn them before he went “postal.”

He claimed in the posts that those comments were what created his desire to commit a mass shooting.

In handwritten journal entries and a handwritten manifesto Garcia posted to the Russian social media site, he included song lyrics and quotes from TV shows.

While in some of his posts Garcia indicated he believed he would survive his attack on the outlet mall, in others he wrote that police would not take him alive and that he knew he would die. He was shot and killed by a police officer within minutes of beginning his attack.

Wall said details like this can be useful to criminal psychologists in creating profiles of mass shooters. Those may, one day, be useful in preventing mass shootings. But for right now, there aren’t enough common trends to be immediately useful.

“It’s not like there’s one profile to look for. There are multiple profiles to look for,” Wall said. “One thing that they’re looking to develop is to look at profiles over time instead of just a single mass shooting.”

But when it comes to mass shooters’ patterns on social media, there are “polar opposites,” Wall said. The way some mass shooters increase their social media presence and others post less and less leading up to an attack only serves to further muddy the waters.

“Some mass shooters, when they studied them, posted and livestreamed all the way through,” Wall said. “Some of the went dark or decreased their social media posting.”