8chan facing the axe after Cloudflare pulls support as more details about El Paso gunman emerge
More details have emerged about the US gunman’s life as a teen, who was inspired by the Australian white-supremacist perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre, as the hate-filled website he used faces the axe.
The seedy website where a gunman is understood to have posted his chilling manifesto shortly before he opened fire at Texas shopping centre is facing the axe.
US cyber security firm Cloudflare said it would terminate online message board 8chan, which is filled with racist and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. It’s also where Patrick Crusius, 21, ranted about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” before he allegedly went on to kill 20 people at a Walmark in El Paso.
The news comes as more details emerged about the suspect, who was inspired by the Australian white-supremacist perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre.
“We just sent a notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time (5pm AEST),” Cloudflare chief executive officer Matthew Prince said in a blog.
“Based on evidence we’ve seen, it appears that he (the gunman) posted a screed to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart killing 20 people,” Prince said.
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The move comes after Mr Prince told The Guardian why the alt-right website should be kept live.
“If I could wave a magic wand and make all of the bad things that are on the internet go away – and I personally would put the Daily Stormer and 8chan in that category of bad things – I would wave that magic wand tomorrow,” Mr Prince told The Guardian.
“It would be the easiest thing in the world and it would feel incredibly good for us to kick 8chan off our network, but I think it would step away from the obligation that we have and cause that community to still exist and be more lawless over time.”
He added that keeping 8chan within the Cloudflare network meant the company could monitor and flag unlawful activities with authorities.
GUNMAN WAS ‘NERDY AND WEIRD’
A former classmate told The Sun Online that she remembered Crusius as “the nerdy quiet kid” who barely spoke to anyone.
He was arrested on in El Paso - on the US-Mexico border - on Saturday after opening fire on adults and children in a packed Walmart using an AK47-type weapon.
Paige Ortiz went to school in Plano, Texas, with the mass shooter and said “people thought he was weird”.
She said: “I went through two school years with him - he was just the quiet nerdy boy in class that kept to himself – he didn’t talk much or at least to me anyway.
“It’s hard to remember a lot about him because he never really stood out or acted out.”
She said he was thought of as a weirdo by schoolmates because of his strange habits in class and she believes he was bullied.
Ortiz added: “People thought he was weird - people had caught him picking his nose and eating scabs and stuff like that.
“I just don’t know what he was thinking going into a Walmart and gunning down so many wives, fathers, children, mums and dads.
“Those people took a trio to the store and will never make it back home, a four-month-old baby.”
PM CONDEMNS ACT OF EXTREMISM
Prime Minister Scott Morrison condemned extremism “of all sorts” today as the US gunman’s praise for Brenton Tarrant was revealed.
He called the El Paso shooting “terribly upsetting” and “distressing” as Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton praised Australia’s tough gun control laws.
“Terrorism takes many forms ... it all begins with extremism and extremism of all sorts of views from whatever perspective and that’s why it’s important that a tolerant society such as Australia gravitates towards the middle,” Mr Morrison said.
“That’s the best defence against these sorts of extremist views that can metastasise into this sort of violence.
“We’ve seen it on so many occasions and it’s terribly upsetting and terribly distressing.”
He added authorities need to be “eternally vigilant” about the threat of extremists.
Mr Dutton called on social media companies and internet giants to do more to prevent extremists posting their views online to prevent copy cats.
He discussed the matter with his counterparts in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network - the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - in a meeting in London last week.
“I think these media companies have a lot more to do and they have a lot more significant role to play than they have in the past,” Mr Dutton said.
Mr Dutton praised Australia’s tough gun control laws, saying they had helped authorities prevent terror attacks on home soil.
Their comments come as Crusius now faces the death penalty, after he posted a manifesto decrying the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” before unleashing one of America’s worst gun massacres in recent history.
He also said he supported the acts of Tarrant, who killed 51 people in and around a mosque in New Zealand in March.
Wearing earmuffs for sound protection, Crusius, who lived a nine hour drive or more than 1000km away in Dallas, spent 20 minutes shooting before calmly handing himself over to police “without incident”.
US authorities have charged him with capital murder.
The FBI have since executed search warrants on three homes associated with Crusius, while Mexico has vowed to take legal action against whoever sold the weapon to the alleged gunman.
An FBI official in El Paso, Texas, says there’s no credible intelligence that the suspected gunman in a mass shooting was working with a group planning other attacks.
But Mexico’s foreign minister says the country plans to take legal action against whoever sold the gun to him.
FBI Special Agent Jeanette Harper said federal investigators were focusing their interviews related to the shooter around Dallas and San Antonio.
Harper also made a plea for anyone with pictures or video from the shooting scene or the Dallas area to upload them to the FBI’s website.
Police in El Paso, Texas, say all bodies have been removed from a Walmart store and parking lot.
It was one of two mass shootings that rocked America over the weekend.
The attack started with Crusius targeting “locals that were fundraising outside the Walmart selling water, children and adults”, a law enforcement officer said.
He was then captured on the store’s CCTV cameras, which showed him in cargo pants and black t-shirt as he raised his gun and fired at the Cielo Vista Mall, injuring at least 26 and killing 20.
The victims ranged in age from 82-years to just a four-months old. Also injured were a two-year-old child and a nine-year-old.
The assault began about 11am Saturday local time, the store packed with about 1000 shoppers.
“On a day that would have been a normal day for someone to leisurely go shopping turned into one of the most deadly days in the history of Texas,” said Governor Greg Abbott.
Victims were filmed being wheeled out of the supermarket on shopping trolleys.
Witnesses who described the horror said Crusius “started shooting everyone, aisle by aisle, with rage”.
GUNMAN’S HATEFUL 8CHAN MANIFESTO
The young white supremacist with seemed to waiver in the lead-up to his vile, white-rage fuelled assault on Saturday.
In a manifesto believed by police to have been written by the 21-year-old who perpetuated America’s worst gun massacre since the carnage that killed 59 in Las Vegas in October, 2017, he expressed some doubt about the evil he had spent planning for “maybe a month, probably less”.
“I have to do this before I lose my nerve,” Crusius is believed to have squirmed in a four-page screed posted online hours on 8chan before two mass shootings rocked the US.
But buoyed by admiration for Christchurch mosque attacker Brenton Tarrant, bewilderingly easy access to battle-ready weapons, toxic online chatrooms and increasingly febrile national debate about race and immigration as America barrels toward the 2020 election, the white supremacist strolled into a Walmart carpark and let loose with a semiautomatic rifle.
The first sentence of the online rant posted on the 8chan message board expressed support for Tarrant.
The online rant speaks of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas”.
“They are the instigators, not me,” it says.
“I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
BODIES CLEARED AS MEXICO VOWS LEGAL ACTION
Texas authorities said all bodies have been removed from the Walmart store and parking lot more than a day after the mass shooting occurred
El Paso police Sgt. Robert Gomez said the shooting was confined to the Walmart and its parking lot, and that the attack did not spread to other nearby shopping areas. More than two dozen people were also injured in Saturday’s attack.
Gomez says the majority of victims were inside the store. Authorities have not yet released victims’ names or ages.
A Justice Department official said the federal government is treating the El Paso shooting as a case of domestic terrorism.
Meanwhile, FBI agents have executed search warrants at three homes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where Crusius had stayed. An agency spokeswoman, Melinda Urbina, declined to give more details on the locations.
One of them was the home of his grandparents in Allen, Texas, where authorities shut down streets following the shooting.
Allen, located 32 kilometres north of Dallas, is an affluent community of about 100,000.
Mexico’s foreign minister said the country plans to take legal action against whoever sold the gun to the alleged gunman.
Marcelo Ebrard said that “it’s urgent that we take corresponding actions against weapons.” Ebrard has frequently cited the flood of illegal weapons from the US to Mexico as a factor in Mexico’s rising rate of violent crime.
Gun ownership is highly restricted in Mexico, requiring special permits, and gun shops are rare. The average Mexican has trouble legally acquiring a handgun, much less an assault weapon.
Ebrard also called Saturday’s shooting “a terrorist act” against Mexicans and urged the US government to “set a clear position against hate crimes.”
HOW THE TEXAS SHOOTING UNFOLDED
It was a blazing 38 degrees in the US-Mexico border city of El Paso, which just days ago was lauded by its high profile presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke, during the second Democrat debate as “one of the safest cities in the United States of America, not despite but because it’s a city of immigrants, and asylum seekers, and refugees.”
Hundreds of people, including the loved ones of the 20 dead and the 26 who are fighting for their lives, can only wish Crusius had listened harder to the voices urging him to hold fire.
A coward in every way, he used a semiautomatic weapon to mow down victims ranging from a four-month-old baby to an 82-year-old, many of them out with family to take advantage of “back to school” sales as the summer holidays wind down.
The evil started in the carpark of the Cielo Vista mall in the west Texas city that sits across the border from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, just before 10.40am.
Crusius, who lived nine hours away in Dallas, fired at a groups who was fundraising by selling bottles of water to shoppers, one of his victims left sprawling beside a folding table under an umbrella.
He then walked into Walmart, rifle raised, with ear muffs and protective eyewear for himself but nothing to save the shoppers at whom he fired as he strolled from aisle to aisle.
Witnesses described an elderly woman, a tiny baby, scores of others falling to his semiautomatic spray. The wounded were later wheeled out of the sprawling supermarket on shopping trolleys.
“The situation is, needless to say, horrific,” said El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen.
And although Crusius boasted in his warped online posting that he was ready to die for his beliefs, saying “I’m not going to surrender even if I run out of ammo”, he thankfully did lay down his weapon and hand himself into police without any further gunfire.
Another example of how his boasting online words were just more snivelling cowardice in the end.
El Paso Police Sergeant Robert Gomez told reporters the suspect was speaking to investigators. “His motives and what transpired are being investigated,” Sgt Gomez said, adding he has not been formally charged.
“This is the most traumatic scene that I’ve been close to and I can tell you that the investigators are doing their best to complete this investigation proper with the respect and dignity the victims deserve, but it is tough to see this type of heinous crime occur in your community.”
Facing capital murder charges from Texas authorities which carry the death penalty, as well as a domestic terrorism and hate crime probe from the FBI, there will possibly be some small measure of justice for his victims. But none of it will bring them back, and nothing short of a miracle will cure an increasingly divided America’s utterly tragic gun violence epidemic.
GUNMAN’S SISTER KILLED IN OHIO SHOOTING
The horror at El Paso wasn’t the only shooting to unfold.
Hours after residents there learnt the reality of the gunman’s carnage, a second shooting unfolded at a bar in Dayton, Ohio. Shortly after midnight local time, Connor Betts used a .223-caliber rifle to murder nine people who were celebrating there.
Betts, who was wearing body armour, was killed in less than a minute by police patrolling the area. The bodies of his sister, Megan, 22, and her boyfriend, were also found in a car nearby.
The Sunday morning attack was America’s 252nd mass shooting this year, according to the independent Gun Violence Archive.
Dayton police tweeted that an active shooter situation began in the Oregon District at 1am local time, but officers nearby were able to “put an end to it quickly.”
Lt. Col. Matt Carper said at a press conference that the suspect was shot to death by responding officers.
At least 16 others were taken to local hospitals with injuries, police said.
Carper said the Ohio gunman used a long gun and fired multiple rounds.
The shooting took place outside Ned Peppers Bar, on the 400 block of East 5th Street.
“This is extremely unusual, obviously, for any community, let alone Dayton,” Carper said. “In our Oregon District, this is unheard of.”
Tributes poured in for Megan, describing her as a “wonderful” young woman.
“These pictures don’t even begin to show our lives together.... I have zero words. I’m so sorry this happened Megan and I love you to the moon and back,” friend Libby wrote. “At least you’re with God now.... Moira Cofer Betts I’m here for you and if you and Mr Betts need anything let me know... I’m absolutely sick...”
Another wrote: “Megan was such a wonderful young lady.”
Betts was known at a local bar as an ever-friendly, happy guy who sometimes came in for a beer or two and was never a troublemaker.
Fellow customer Mike Kern said he sometimes played trivia with the slain shooter, at Romer’s Bar & Grill in Bellbrook, Betts’ hometown southeast of Dayton.
Kern said Betts often knew answers about current events and pop culture and never discussed violence.
Kern describes Betts as “the nicest kid you could imagine.”
Bartender Andy Baker said Betts was at Romer’s last Monday and seemed fine.
Baker said when he saw Betts identified as the shooter in the early Sunday massacre in a popular entertainment district, he thought: “There’s no way that’s the guy.”
AMERICA’S WORST SHOOTINGS
1. Walmart in El Paso, August 3, 2019: 20 killed
Alleged 21-year-old gunman Patrick Crusius opens fire on Walmart shoppers in Texas, killing 20 and injuring 26, including three children. He then calmly surrenders to an approaching SWAT team. Police investigating links to white nationalism.
2. Gilroy Garlic Festival, July 28, 2019: 3 killed
Santino William Legan, 19, guns down revellers at a California food festival, killing two children — a 6-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl — and a 25-year-old man. Dozens more are injured before the gunman is killed in a shootout with police.
3. Virginia Beach government offices, May 31, 2019: 12 killed
Disgruntled worker DeWayne Craddock opens fire, killing 12 people and wounding several others before he is gunned down by police.
4. Aurora manufacturing plant, February 15, 2019: Five killed
Gary Martin kills five co-workers during a disciplinary meeting where he was fired. He wounds one other employee and five of the first police officers to arrive at the suburban Chicago plant before he is killed during a shootout with police.
5. Thousand Oaks, California, November 7, 2018: 12 killed
Ian David Long kills 12 people at a country music bar, before taking his own life. Long was a Marine combat veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
6. Tree of Life synagogue, October 27, 2018: 11 killed
Robert Bowers opens fire at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during Shabbat morning services, killing 11 and injuring others. It’s the deadliest attack on Jews in the US in history.
7. Capital Gazette offices, June 28, 2018: Five killed
Jarrod Ramos shoots through the windows of the Capital Gazette newspaper offices in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five. Authorities say Ramos had sent threatening letters to the newspaper prior to the attack.
8. Santa Fe High School, May 18, 2018: 10 killed.
Dimitrios Pagourtzis, 17, opens fire during an art class at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas. He kills eight students and two teachers and 13 others are wounded. Explosives are found at the school and off campus.
9. Parkland, Florida, February 14, 2018: 17 killed
Nikolas Cruz shoots and kills 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. It surpasses Columbine High School as the deadliest shooting at a high school in US history.
10. First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, November 5, 2017: 25 and an unborn child killed
Devin Patrick Kelley walks into a small church in rural Texas, shooting dead s 25 people and an unborn child. The shooter is found dead after the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history.
11. The Harvest Music Festival, Las Vegas, October 1, 2017: 58 killed
Stephen Paddock, 64, fires from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on a crowd of more than 20,000 gathered on the Las Vegas Strip for a country music festival. He kills 58 people and injures more than 500 in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. Police believe the gunman then killed himself.
12. Pulse nightclub, June 12, 2016: 49 killed
Omar Saddiqui Mateen, 29, opens fire inside Pulse, a gay nightclub, in Orlando, killing at least 49 people and injuring more than 50 are injured. Police shoot and kill Mateen during an operation to free hostages officials say he was holding at the club.
13. Virginia Tech: April 16, 2007, 32 killed
Student Seung-Hui Cho, 23, goes on a shooting spree, killing 32 people in two locations and wounding an undetermined number of others on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. The shooter dies by suicide.
14. Sandy Hook, December 14, 2012: 27 killed
Adam Lanza, 20, kills 20 children, ages 6 and 7, and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before turning the gun on himself. The shooter also killed his mother.
15. Dayton, Ohio, August 4, 2019: 9 killed
Unnamed shooter shot by police after opening fire at Ned Peppers Bar.
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