A6| Friday, August 9, 2019 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
U.S. NEWS
Motor Corp., drugmaker Aller-
gan PLC and Hudson Bay Co.’s
Saks Fifth Avenue also have
installed gunshot-detection
sensors designed to alert em-
ployees and law enforcement
of initial shots fired in some
factories, offices and stores.
Massachusetts-based Shooter
Detection Systems LLC, one of
the biggest sellers in the field,
has installed more than 20,
devices in offices, sports are-
nas and airports, CEO Chris-
tian Connors said.
The measures can go only so
far, security experts say. In set-
tings that allow public access,
such as retail outlets, there is
often little employers can do to
screen customers at the door
since companies want to allow
consumers to come and go eas-
ily. Some workers say that has
motivated them to think of un-
conventional techniques to
cope in a potential attack.
At Carmella’s Cafe and Des-
sert Bar in Charleston, S.C.,
Courtney Botti said she and
her colleagues recently shared
their strategies for avoiding
gunfire. Her plan: jumping into
the walk-in cooler, which has
room for at least 10 people,
she estimated. The door is
made of thick stainless steel,
she said, and requires a key to
enter. “It might be cold, but at
least we’d be safe,” she said.
That isn’t necessarily so,
said former Boston Police
Commissioner Ed Davis. Such
a refuge might work against
some handguns and hunting ri-
fles, but the bullets commonly
sprayed by military-style guns
can pierce metal, he said.
Frequent mass shootings are
leading some employers to re-
visit their policies involving
guns. In nearly two dozen
states, including Texas, Florida
and Illinois, where citizens may
carry handguns, most work-
sites still ban firearms on the
premises, though many people
keep guns nearby in their cars.
Some bosses have deployed
more basic approaches. River
Run, a tech services firm near
Milwaukee, resorted to stash-
ing cans of the insecticide Raid
on the desks of its roughly 25
staffers in the office. CEO Paul
T. Riedl Jr. said he believes the
bug spray poses a lower risk
than arming employees with a
gun that could accidentally
hurt someone. Staffers could
spray the chemical in the face
of an intruder from 20 feet
away, he said, giving them at
least a chance to disorient a
potential shooter.
“Aim for the eyes, aim for
the head and just keep shoot-
ing with a steady stream of
bug spray,” Mr. Riedl said.After El Paso,
Workers Plan
Escape Paths
Like many U.S. workers
lately, Maricarmen Molina has
mentally mapped out how she
hopes to escape should a gun-
man ever enter her workplace.
The 26-year-old shop stew-
ard at a New Jersey apparel
warehouse said she plans to
sprint to the back of the
sprawling building and hide
between racks of nearly floor-
length dresses, trying not to
make a sound.
It is a strategy she re-evalu-
ated over the weekend as back-
to-back mass shootings un-
folded at a Walmart in El Paso,
Texas, and outside a bar in
Dayton, Ohio. After so many
such incidents, Ms. Molina said
a shooting attack no longer
feels like a fluke event that
could happen to someone else.
A few months ago, she went so
far as to test her plan, hiding
in the dresses as a colleague
confirmed she couldn’t be seen.
“Sadly,” Ms. Molina said, “we
live in a world where you should
always suspect the worst.”
Many workers and managers
say talking through similar
what-if scenarios has become
water-cooler conversation this
week, especially in stores and
other places easily accessible to
consumer traffic. Even before
the weekend shootings that left
31 people dead and injured doz-
ens, some say they plotted es-
cape paths or hiding spots.
Others stocked insect spray on
desks to disorient a gunman or
purchased doorbells to use as
makeshift panic buttons.
The contingency plans
aren’t so much fail-safe strate-
gies as a reflection of the col-
lective anxiety and futility
they feel, some say.
“It’s a shame we have to
live this way,” said Carlo A.
Scissura, president and chief
executive of the New York
Building Congress, an industry
group, who decided Monday to
add active-shooter training to
a staff meeting in September.
Corporate efforts to improve
workplace security range from
additional training to new
technology. Active-shooter
training—initially coined “run,
hide, fight” for the basic tactics
it advocated—now frequently
includes demonstrations on
knocking out windows, build-
ing barriers and distracting a
gunman. Some companies are
pairing such training with
stepped-up security, such as
locking additional doors or
adding keycard systems.
Employers such as Toyota
ByChip Cutter,
Kelsey Gee
andRuth Simonabout a month preparing for
the attack. He moved out of his
grandparents’ home about six
weeks before the shooting.
They thought he was about to
take the next step in his life,
perhaps a transfer to a four-
year university, a job, or a mili-
tary career.
When his mother, Lori,
learned he had ordered an AK-
style rifle several weeks ago,
she called Allen police and was
referred to a safety-resource of-
ficer to talk through her con-
cerns that her inexperienced
son had purchased the weapon.
“This was a mother who is
learning that her kid is getting
a gun and simply thinking,
‘What do I do?’ ” Mr. Ayres
said.
The department asked a few
questions about the firearm,
but ultimately told her Mr. Cru-
sius was legally allowed to own
the gun.
Now the family is wondering
what they missed, and where
he picked up the ideas outlined
in the manifesto authorities be-
lieve he posted.
When told about what Mr.
Crusius has said to authorities,
Mr. Ayres said: “This isn’t the
Patrick they knew, and it’s not
the view of the world that they
have.”
Mr. Crusius was last seen by
his twin sister when the two
hung out at their grandparents’
house on Aug. 1, two days be-
fore the shooting. She didn’t
notice anything out the ordi-
nary with her brother, Mr. Ay-
res said. Mr. Crusius also vis-
ited the home the next night
before making the approxi-
mately 10-hour drive to El Paso,
but no other family members
were there.
The celebratory posts on
8chan after the shooting reveal
what experts say has become a
motivation for many of the
young men who launch attacks
in public places: the desire for
notoriety in the public and
glory in certain corners of the
internet, regardless of whether
they survive or not.
“They’re seeking to become
the next alluring antihero,” said
Stephen G. White, a psycholo-
gist who has studied multiple
mass shooters. “One of our
concerns is that these guys are
thinking about the body count.
‘How can I score more points
than the last guy?’ It’s a very
terrible trend.”
The two students who
launched an attack at Colum-
bine High School in 1999 have
remained subjects of fascina-
tion for two decades. Elliot
Rodger, who killed six people in
Isla Vista, Calif., in 2014, has
become a hero to an online
community of men who call
themselves “Incels”—short for
“involuntarily celibate”—who
espouse misogynistic ideas and
violence toward women. He
was cited as an inspiration by a
man who allegedly plowed his
van into a crowd in Toronto
last year, killing 10 people.
Jillian Peterson, a professor
of criminal justice at Hamline
University who studies the life
histories of mass shooters, said
the past 20 years of mass
shootings and heavy media cov-
erage have created a “cultural
script” for people who are
struggling emotionally to draw
attention to themselves.
To be noticed today, she
said, the shootings have to be
“bigger and bolder” than in the
past. “They are these violent
performances, meant to be seen
and watched,” she said.
—Zusha Elinson, Sadie
Gurman, Jennifer Calfas,
Tawnell D. Hobbs, Jim
Carlton, Talal Ansari and
Elisa Cho contributed to this
article.makes it hard to determine
what else he may have posted,
who he communicated with and
whether he left any clues to
what he was planning.
Mr. Ayres, his family’s law-
yer, said the family is baffled by
where he picked up some of the
ideas contained in the mani-
festo, which seemed more so-
phisticated than the way he
usually talked. His grandfather,
Mr. Ayres said, “never got the
impression that Patrick was go-
ing to a dark or strange place.”
The public defender repre-
senting Mr. Crusius didn’t re-
turn calls seeking comment.
After his arrest, Mr. Crusius
has spoken at length to author-
ities. “He basically didn’t hold
anything back,” El Paso Chief
Greg Allen said. “He expected
to die.”
8chan offers forums where
racist views and the celebration
of mass shooters are unfet-
tered. The site was launched in
response to the censoring of
certain views on 4chan, an-
other fringe site. The only rule
of the forum is that users not
post, request or link to any
content that is illegal in the
U.S.
After the shooting, which
killed 22, the owner of the fo-
rum, Jim Watkins, defended it
in a YouTube video, saying his
company was helping law en-
forcement in its investigation.
He said the manifesto may have
been written by Mr. Crusius but
uploaded by another user.
People who have spent time
on the site said they couldn’t
recall Mr. Crusius ever previ-
ously identifying himself in
posts. Few users ever do so,
they said.
It appears that he was famil-
iar before Saturday with the fo-
rum, which can be difficult for
first-time users to navigate.
The site is divided into more
than 21,000 discussion boards,
and the one Mr. Crusius chose,
called “politically incorrect,” is
the same one used by the gun-
men in two other shootings:
the April killing of a worshiper
at a synagogue in Poway, Calif.,
and the March killing of 51 at
two mosques in Christchurch,
New Zealand.
Mr. Crusius appears to have
been influenced by previous
manifestos on the site. In the
first paragraph of his own man-
ifesto, he laid out how New
Zealand shooter Brenton Tar-
rant spurred him to launch his
own attack, writing, “In gen-
eral, I support the Christchurch
shooter and his manifesto.” In
March, Mr. Tarrant allegedly
posted a 74-page anti-Muslim
manifesto to 8chan before he
began shooting. He is often re-
ferred to on the site as “St. Tar-
rant.”
Mr. Crusius appeared to be
nervous about how his mani-
festo and subsequent shooting
would be received on the
board. “I have do this before I
lose my nerve,” he wrote. “I fig-
ured that an under-prepared at-
tack and a meh manifesto is
better than no attack and no
manifesto.”
In the hours after the attack,
a discussion broke out on
8chan about his place in the
history of mass shooters. Re-
sponses were riddled with rac-
ist and antigay language. One
said, “Every shabbat,” which a
regular 8chan user said was anContinuedfromPageOneSuspect
Got Ideas
Online
Shoppers exit with their hands up after the mass shooting that left 22 people dead at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.JORGE SALGADO/REUTERSAYLA PEQUEÑO VIA STORYFULexpression of hope that there
would be a mass shooting ev-
ery week.
“The new guys deserves
some praise, he reached almost
a third of the high score,” one
commenter wrote, a reference
to the largest death toll in any
mass shooting. 8chan users
regularly refer to the death
count in mass shootings as the
“score.”
Others mocked him for fail-
ing to kill more people, or for
targeting Hispanics instead of
Jews.
“Hail all our men of action
and martyrs,” wrote one per-
son. “Hail Tarrant, Bow-
ers...Roof, Breivik, and Ernest,”
a list of shooters who espoused
racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Is-
lamic ideas.
The manifesto went online
at 10:15 a.m. local time, about
25 minutes before Mr. Crusius
allegedly began his slaughter.
There has been no indication
that any 8chan users alerted
authorities, according to one
law-enforcement official. Site
administrators eventually re-
moved the manifesto, but it
was reposted and mentioned on
8chan and other fringe social
media sites more than 750
times, according to Storyful, a
social media analytics company.
(Storyful is owned by NewsCorp, the parent company of
The Wall Street Journal.) It
also was mentioned more than
77,000 times on mainstream so-
cial-media sites, including Face-
book.
The FBI is now turning more
attention to violence by white
supremacists in the U.S. after
nearly two decades in which it
primarily focused on overseas
Islamic extremism. Domestic
terrorists are being radicalized
online in much the same way as
their overseas counterparts.
While federal law enforce-
ment has wide latitude to crack
down on foreign terror plots,
the First Amendment compli-
cates investigators’ efforts to
thwart attacks by Americans. If
white supremacists share hate-
ful comments among them-
selves on online forums, even if
they talk about weapons, the
FBI is largely powerless to in-
vestigate because both speech
and gun ownership are pro-
tected rights.
Because Mr. Crusius’s mani-
festo didn’t include specific
plans to carry out a shooting, it
isn’t clear whether law enforce-
ment would have taken action
even if they had known about
it. There regularly are many
vague threats of hate-fueled vi-
olence on numerous sites
across the internet. On 8chan
alone, there were 2,370 posts in
a single hour on Aug. 5, two
days after the shooting.
If someone in the U.S. were
communicating with a foreign
terrorist overseas about weap-
ons or ideology, U.S. terrorism
laws give authorities the ability
at least to take a closer look
and launch an investigation, if
warranted. But federal officialshave fewer options when it
comes to domestic threats be-
cause the U.S. government has
no specific statute for acts of
domestic terrorism. Prosecu-
tors instead frequently turn to
hate-crime or gun-related laws.
“It’s not a question of man-
power, it’s really a question of
the ability to begin to penetrate
that sort of circle,” said Mi-
chael Mullaney, who worked as
the Justice Department’s coun-
terterrorism chief during the
Bush, Obama and Trump ad-
ministrations.
Mr. Crusius grew up com-
fortable in the majority white
suburb of Allen. His parents di-
vorced in 2011, in part becauseof his father’s drinking and
drug use, according to court
documents and a memoir pub-
lished by his father. He at-
tended high school in Plano,
wherehetookalawenforce-
ment course and was part of
the 2017 graduating class of
more than 1,000.
“He didn’t necessarily have a
lot of friends,” said Paige Nun-
nally-Rowley, who attended
Plano Senior High School and
Collin College, a nearby com-
munity college, with him. “He
just shied away from a lot of
people, no matter who they
were.”
Mr. Crusius’s twin sister,Emily, was more popular, with
a large group of high-school
friends, said Damarius Griffin,
who graduated in 2016.
After finishing high school,
Mr. Crusius enrolled at Collin
and moved in with his grand-
parents.
Some postings on a Twitter
account with his name, which
had the handle @outsider609,
suggest that his political lean-
ings were to the right, although
not out of the mainstream. The
movement to build a border
wall with Mexico, said one, “is
the best way that @POTUS has
worked to secure our country
so far!”
The manifesto said he spentAlleged gunman Patrick Crusius is led away by police at the site
of the El Paso shooting.8chan Users
The online forum is most
popular among younger males.Source: SimilarWebGender breakdown
Female15.1%
Male 84.9%18-
25-
34-
45-
55-
65+25.1%
32.
15.
11.
8.
7.Age distributionThe gunman looks
to have been
influenced by
previous manifestos.No-Drill MudFlaps
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