Prior contact between mass shooters and law enforcement or intelligence

A suicidal pill-popping pizza guy romanced by a sweet, young FBI informant who endorses mass murder...an FBI agent photographing an attempted mass shooting...finally, a long and depressing list

It’s a meme at this point: pretty much every major mass shooting is followed with a sheepish admission by the FBI or some other alphabet agency that the shooter was “on their radar.” If you haven’t noticed, it’s ok, that probably means you’re a normal, well-adjusted person who has by necessity managed to tune out the constant background thrum of these horrible events. This article is intended to document this pattern by compiling instances of prior contact between federal agents and mass shooters. It is a pattern that yearns for a satisfactory explanation.

If we were to bend ourselves into a maximally charitable pretzel, we could try to argue this only indicates that US intelligence and law enforcement cast a wide net. Mass shooters are the type of guys you would expect to have legal troubles, so it is not surprising to learn that they have frequently been reported to or investigated by law enforcement, and the cases where the feds successfully stop a mass shooter don’t tend to dominate headlines for days or weeks at a time. The combination of these effects produces a biased view (or so this line of thinking goes), since the few assailants that slip through the fingers of federal agencies and commit spectacular attacks are the ones that draw all the attention. There is no doubt that this accounts for some fraction of the disconcerting frequency with which the US government turns out to have monitored or interacted with mass shooters before their crimes. But here’s the problem with this school of thought: Are you a mark?

It could not be more clear that these organizations have failed to earn the benefit of the doubt. Consider Khalil Abu Rayyan, the 21-year-old suicidal pill-popping pizza boy that two successive FBI informants digitally romanced into falling in love. Rayyan attracted this attention by retweeting an ISIS video on Twitter and posting a photograph of himself with a rifle and the caption “Sahwat hunting,” using ISIS vernacular for people that oppose the group. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was very obviously a sad loser who wanted to look tough, U.S. law enforcement pounced, first sending “Ghaada,” who messaged him on Twitter and within days was pretending to plan for marriage. Interestingly, “Ghaada” seems to have developed a conscience instead of making an effort to coerce Rayyan into violence — shortly before abruptly ghosting him, she wrote, “You have to be careful Khalil. It sounds like you are being watched,” to which he replied “I think they are looking for people that want to attack them or go to Syria. I don't want to do either of that. I just want my baby.” What a killer!

(Sinister image dripping with danger that helped Khalil Abu Rayyan draw the romantic attention of the FBI, taken from CNN.)

Two days after “Ghaada” mercifully stopped responding to Rayyan, the FBI had another informant, “Jannah,” send him a message on Twitter. Again, the lonely fellow quickly fell in love, and soon “Jannah” was enthusiastically advocating for jihad. Rayyan generally discouraged these urges in his sweetheart, though at times he did attempt to impress “Jannah” by pretending to have weapons or plans that he did not really have. A recording of one of their phone calls — during which Rayyan clearly expresses crushing depression and suicidal ideation — has been released. Preying on Rayyan’s inner turmoil, “Jannah” attempts to steer him toward violence: “Which path is greater to you right now? Hurting yourself, or somebody else? […] Nobody should take away their own life...[W]hen it's jihad or...for a cause, that's the only time Allah...allows it. But not to put your life to waste.” Rayyan’s response to her initial question says it all: “Well, I mean, I would not like to hurt somebody else. But at the same time, if I did it to myself, it’d be easier. I wouldn’t get in trouble.” Ultimately, after the FBI honeytrap failed to prod him into any kind of violence, Rayyan was thrown in jail for unlawful possession of a handgun he had purchased to protect himself on his pizza delivery route in Detroit. He wasted more than three years of his life in jail before being released in 2020.

Hopefully you agree that that story is blood-curdling. However, there is still some minuscule degree of plausible deniability surrounding the actions of the feds that targeted Rayyan. Perhaps this was “just” a case of an over-enthusiastic informant trying to prod a sting target into incriminating speech or suss out his true motives, without any intention of coercing him into genuine violence. I doubt it, but who knows. No such deniability exists when it comes to the 2015 attempted mass shooting perpetrated at a “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest in Garland, Texas.

First, a quick sketch of the event and its immediate context: An anti-Muslim group organized a contest to see who could draw the funniest picture of Muhammad, with a $10,000 prize promised to the winner of the May 3rd, 2015 event. The Texas competition was organized in response to the infamous January 7th, 2015 massacre in France, which saw 12 employees of Charlie Hebdo magazine murdered by two men who had been intensely monitored by French intelligence for five years before the attack (hey wait a minute!). The shootings provoked worldwide disgust that frequently manifested as blatant Islamophobia. The Garland cartoon competition provided a prime example of this—Islam forbids artistic representations of Muhammad (Charlie Hebdo’s choice to feature a cartoon of Muhammad on their cover was the reason provided for that act of mass murder, too). Ostensibly angered by the contest, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi, both of whom had pledged their allegiance to ISIS shortly beforehand, drove to Texas from Arizona intending to massacre the event’s participants. After the pair rolled up, opened fire, and hit a security guard in the leg, a traffic officer promptly killed them both, averting a near-disaster. Yay, cops! Haha, just kidding.

It turns out Simpson had been intensely surveilled by the FBI for several years in advance of the attack due to his ties to a former US Navy sailor who had been arrested and convicted on terrorism charges — from 2006 to 2010, one of Simpson’s close friends was an FBI informant who recorded over 1500 hours of conversations with Simpson, ultimately receiving $132,000 for his services. Although the government failed to prove any terror-related motivations, in 2011 Simpson was convicted for lying to the FBI about these conversations and spent three years on probation. Nadir Soofi, Simpson’s roommate and fellow attacker, is not known to have shared Simpson’s history of FBI contact, but several years before the attack Soofi purchased one of the guns that he would later bring to Garland from a gun store known as Lone Wolf Trading Company. Perhaps not coincidentally, Lone Wolf has been involved in multiple shady law enforcement/intelligence operations: they provided government-sanctioned automatic rifles to violent narcotrafficking gangs as part of the ATF’s “Fast and Furious” cartel-arming operation as well as the FBI’s Oklahoma-City-bombing-connected “PATCON” operation, making the moniker “Lone Wolf” somewhat ironic. Although a seven-day hold was placed on Soofi’s purchase, it was lifted for unclear reasons after 24 hours, and he received the gun without issue.

Several weeks before the 2015 attack, Simpson purportedly came back to the FBI’s attention for jihad-related online postings, prompting another round of monitoring and surveillance. During this period of renewed interest, a week and a half out from the attack, Simpson was put into contact with an FBI agent through his network of extremist friends online. In the course of one of their exchanges, when Simpson brought up the cartoon contest, the fed responded, “Tear up Texas,” with Simpson replying, “That goes without saying” — an apparent example of an FBI agent encouraging violence at an imminent public event, which was furthermore received positively by its recipient. It’s difficult to understand how the FBI could have allowed this attack to happen by mistake, given such an obvious telegraphing of intention. And it’s not like the pair fell off the FBI’s radar in the week and a half intervening between that exchange and the shooting — the Bureau installed a surveillance camera outside Simpson’s and Soofi’s apartment the day they left for Texas. But don’t worry, it gets worse.

Incredibly, the FBI agent that told Simpson to “Tear up Texas” wasn’t just talking shit: He was also at the event….….in the car immediately behind Soofi and Simpson’s……………….taking cell phone photographs of the people that Soofi and Simpson were about to attack……………………..thirty seconds before the shooting. An image taken by the agent is reproduced below, screenshotted from the CBS documentary on the FBI ties to the attack. Sidebar: I couldn’t find a free version of the doc, so I just signed up for a Paramount+ trial and then cancelled before they charged me. Easy enough, and I recommend it if you’re interested in this insane case. Ponder why they deployed obvious CIA asset Anderson Cooper to discuss these events. Anyway, back to business, the photo the FBI agent snapped happens to include Bruce Joiner (left), the only man Simpson and Soofi injured. The fed, who remains unidentified, fled the scene immediately when shooting broke out, but he was detained at gunpoint by local police (as seen in the second photo below, also from the CBS documentary). When CBS asked the FBI for comment on these revelations, they responded, “There was no advance knowledge of a plot to attack the cartoon drawing contest in Garland, Texas.”

(Cell phone photo snapped by FBI agent thirty seconds before shooting, including Bruce Joiner (left), the man Soofi and Simpson were about to shoot, taken from CBS segment on the event)

(Local Garland news footage of police arresting the FBI agent who encouraged the cartoon contest attack and photographed the targets from the car behind the shooters 30 seconds before they opened fire, also from CBS segment on the event)

Joiner, the security guard Simpson and Soofi wounded before being killed, was branded the “first ISIS victim on US soil”. But as information trickled out about the FBI connection to the attack, he and his attorney began to locate responsibility elsewhere. Eventually they decided to sue the FBI seeking damages, claiming in the court filing that the Bureau “helped the terrorists obtain a weapon that was used in the attack by lifting a hold during a background check, incited the terrorist to attack the Garland event, and even sent an agent to accompany the terrorists as they carried out the attack.” As you might expect, the FBI and DOJ argued for the suit’s dismissal, and they succeeded. And the official story from government prosecutors is that the FBI agent simply had no idea that he was in the car behind two would-be mass shooters who the FBI was closely surveilling and who the agent had corresponded with a week beforehand. He didn’t even know they were in Texas! It was just an unfortunate coincidence that he was following them taking pictures of the man they were about to shoot. He was there for a completely different operation related to a totally different guy. I hate when that happens! Case closed.

I still find the Garland case breathtaking no matter how many times I read or think about it. It’s truly a peek behind the veil, and it radically reframed every other example of prior contact between mass shooters and US intelligence or law enforcement for me. If Simpson and Soofi had managed to get through and do some serious damage, do you think we would have heard about the FBI connections to the attack? We might have eventually learned about Simpson’s earlier FBI scrutiny—exactly the sort of connection that frequently emerges after more “successful” mass shootings, as you’ll see below—but I’m confident that the actions of the “Tear up Texas” agent would never have seen the light of day, and ditto for “Jannah” if she had managed to get Rayyan to snap and do something spectacular.

An obvious question that emerges here is just….WHY? Why would this be a thing? That could be its own post (or book for that matter), and I think the answer is complex and multifaceted, but part of what’s going on is that our political system is structured such that every level of government benefits from occurrences and near-occurrences of these events. Individual federal agents receive adulation and career advancement when they orchestrate plausible-looking attacks and then stop them at the last minute—a dangerous game that can obviously spin out of control quickly. Agencies like the FBI benefit directly from the attacks through budget increases and mandate expansions. The federal government more broadly can use these attacks to sculpt narratives and influence mass psychology, “target[ing] domestic populations in order to make them receptive or hostile to certain political or economic policies.” The United States and its NATO allies, of course, have a history of using spectacular mass violence in this way. Generally speaking, one could imagine that governments and corporations prefer malleable, easily coerced citizen-consumers, and one way to achieve enhanced citizen malleability is to introduce an ever-present background probability of sudden death from horrific random acts of violence by fellow citizens.

Anyway. Over the past ~two years I’ve pulled together a pretty long list of examples of prior contact between mass shooters and agencies of US law enforcement and intelligence. It’s on Twitter as a thread that has reached about a half million people, but it seems worth reproducing in this format as well, which might end up being more durable. Here’s the thread:

12 Ball @BoltzmannBooty

Some examples of FBI prior knowledge of and/or contact with mass shooters

The thread started off focusing on the FBI, but I loosened that to include other federal agencies, and in this Substack post I’ll also be including a few examples of contact with military intelligence as well. I also counted some events that don’t quite qualify as “mass shootings” by most traditional definitions, e.g. the D.C. sniper attacks. Dozens or hundreds more plots and attacks could be incorporated by expanding the area of inquiry to include bombings and terror sting operations more generally, but even just focusing on multi-casualty shootings provides ample material. I expect this list and its Twitter thread progenitor will continue to be updated for a long time, since this phenomenon shows no signs of abating. Many, maybe even most, examples of prior knowledge of mass shooters by intelligence agencies and law enforcement have innocent explanations, but the cases of the sad pizza guy and the Garland shooters suggest something more sinister may lurk behind some of these stories.

List of examples of prior contact between mass shooters and law enforcement or intelligence

• 2001/09/10 - Sacramento, California - 6 dead, 2 wounded

  • “His threats against Burns International Security employees so concerned company officials that a day before the shootings began, they warned the FBI, which took a report but did not investigate.”

• 2002 - Washington D.C. metropolitan area - 17 dead, 10 injured

  • “As calmly as he had walked in, Muhammad walked out into daylight and out of trouble. Sandilands followed him outside, but [D.C. sniper John Allen] Muhammad was already gone. The fisherman later told his buddies that he had a feeling Muhammad was a terrorist.

    Others in Bellingham, post 9/11, had the same feeling. Three people, on three separate occasions, reported their suspicions to the FBI.”

• 2009/11/05 - Fort Hood, Texas - 14 dead, 33 injured

  • “Nearly a year before the massacre, the bureau intercepted emails between Nidal Hasan and radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki that officials called ‘fairly benign.’ They are anything but.”

  • “An FBI agent in the San Diego field office, whom the Webster report identifies as ‘SD-Agent,’ reviewed this email, but again failed to link it to the Hasan case. He ultimately determined it was ‘Not a Product of Interest.’ On June 11, the same agent read the Washington task force’s report on the Hasan investigation. While he still didn’t connect the dots with the message he read, the agent was dismayed that the investigation hadn’t gone deeper and considered the justification for not interviewing Hasan ‘weak excuses.’ His colleagues in San Diego agreed. In fact, according to the Webster Commission, one of them believed Hasan must have been a confidential source—why else would the Washington office conduct such a perfunctory investigation?”

• 2012/05/02 - Gilbert, Arizona - 4 dead

  • “The FBI says it was already conducting a domestic terrorism investigation of anti-immigration border vigilante and neo-Nazi J.T. Ready before he killed his girlfriend and three others last week, according to The Arizona Republic.”

• 2012/08/05 - Oak Creek, Wisconsin - 8 dead, 3 injured

  • “Wade Michael Page, the 40-year-old man killed by police at the scene of Sunday's shooting rampage at a Sikh temple near Milwaukee who authorities say gunned down six people and wounded three others, was referred to in a report the FBI received about six years ago, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston says.

    Dina said earlier on Morning Edition and on the NPR Newscast that Page had ‘popped up on the FBI's radar.’ She now adds some details: Page was mentioned in a report about someone else. But sources with knowledge of the investigation tell her that the FBI never opened a formal investigation because Page didn't appear to be a threat.”

  • “He served [in the Army] approximately from 1992 to 1998, and was assigned to psychological operations - the specialists who analyze, develop and distribute intelligence used for information and psychological effect.

    ‘That is very exclusive,’ said John Liebert, a psychiatrist who performs fitness examinations for the military and is an expert on suicidal mass murderers. ‘It's like going from the lobby to the 20th floor.’

    […]

    Fred Allen Lucas, a Bloomington, Ind., man who served with Page at Fort Bragg, N.C., in a psychological operations battalion, recalled that he spoke of the need for securing a homeland for white people and referred to all non-whites as ‘dirt people.’”

• 2012/12/14 - Sandy Hook, Connecticut - 28 dead, 2 injured

  • “Years before the Sandy Hook shooting, law enforcement agents visited Lanza's family home after he hacked into a government computer system in ninth grade, his neighbors told FBI agents investigating the Sandy Hook shooting. 

    Lanza's mother, Nancy, told neighbors at a party that her son made it to the second level of security on a government site. A third layer of security was able to thwart his hack. 

    Nancy Lanza believed the authorities came from either the FBI or CIA – but neighbors told the FBI that she couldn't remember which agency.”

• 2013/08/13 - St. Joseph, Louisiana - 3 dead

  • “In a statement released Friday, the FBI said agents had interviewed the man responsible for last week’s hostage situation in Tensas Parish in April, and that the man had talked to them about how he was hearing voices in his head.”

• 2014/04/14 - Overland Park, Kansas- 3 dead

  • “Frazier Glenn Cross, the man accused of murder in the shootings of three people outside Jewish facilities in Kansas last week was, for all practical purposes, born at the age of 49.

    The federal government gave him that name when he was released from prison in 1990, along with a new social security number and a new place to live, not far from the Missouri River in western Iowa.

    The idea was to erase any connection to the man he had been before: Frazier Glenn Miller. White Nationalist leader. Spewer of hate. Federal informant.”

• 2015/05/03 - Garland, Texas - 2 dead, 1 injured

  • See extensive discussion above list.

• 2016/06/12 - Orlando, Florida - 50 dead, 58 injured

  • “One of the people they spoke to was Omar Mateen, a young security guard from a nearby town who had attended the same mosque as the suicide bomber and had been on a terrorism watch list for incendiary comments he once made to co-workers at a local courthouse. But the F.B.I. soon ended its examination of Mr. Mateen after finding no evidence that he posed a terrorist threat to his community.”

  • “Investigators looking into Mateen’s statements to co-workers introduced confidential informants, followed him and recorded his conversations, among other methods.”

  • “[FBI agent] Martin testified that he considered trying to develop Mateen as an informant but apparently that never happened.”

  • “[Mateen] was hired by G4S Secure Solutions USA, Inc., to work as an armed security guard. […] In 1954, George Wackenhut, a former F.B.I. agent, started a small detective agency in Miami. It grew to become the Wackenhut Corporation, an international conglomerate that worked closely with the F.B.I. and the C.I.A…His company was bought, in 2002, by the Danish firm that later became G4S.”

  • “Seddique Mateen, the father of the man behind the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre, worked with the FBI as a confidential informant for more than a decade leading right up to the shooting, according to attorneys for the shooter's widow.”

• 2017/01/06 - Ft. Lauderdale, Florida - 5 dead, 42 injured

  • “The suspect believed to have shot five people to death in a rampage at a Florida airport Friday was being treated in Alaska after complaining of hearing voices and had recently claimed to the FBI that the CIA was forcing him to watch ISIS videos, federal officials said.”

• 2017/12/07 - Aztec, New Mexico - 3 dead

  • “An NBC News examination of the Aztec High School shooting — including a review of government records and an audio recording of an FBI interview of the future shooter — found a series of missed opportunities that point to what some experts say are nationwide shortcomings in how authorities assess and respond to potentially violent domestic extremists.”

• 2018/02/14 - Parkland, Florida - 17 dead, 17 injured

  • “The F.B.I. received a tip last month from someone close to Nikolas Cruz that he owned a gun and had talked of committing a school shooting, the bureau revealed Friday, but it acknowledged that it had failed to investigate.”

  • “The tip about Mr. Cruz appeared to be the second in four months, after another person told the bureau about online comments from Mr. Cruz that he wanted to become ‘a professional school shooter.’”

  • “Nikolas Cruz was immature, quirky and depressed when James and Kimberly Snead took him into their Parkland home. … James, 48, is a decorated army veteran and a military intelligence analyst who served stints in the Middle East between 1988 and 1996.”

• 2020/02/26 - Milwaukee, Wisconsin - 6 dead

  • “The wife told investigators Ferrill was concerned about people following him, but said his behavior did not reach the point of him getting professional help. She also said he had never been on medication for depression or anxiety.

    She recalled, the records show, her husband showing her an email about the noose incident.

    She said she was unaware Ferrill went to the FBI office in February 2019.

    The records do not elaborate on the nature of his visit.”

• 2020/12/26 - Rockford, Illinois - 3 dead, 3 injured

  • “Webb, who joined the Army in July 2008, is a decorated Special Forces assistant operations and intelligence sergeant. He served four tours of duty in Afghanistan, the most recent ending in July.”

• 2021/03/22 - Boulder, Colorado - 10 dead, 2 injured

  • “The suspect’s identity was previously known to the F.B.I. because he was linked to another individual under investigation by the bureau, according to law enforcement officials.”

• 2021/04/15 - Indianapolis, Indiana - 9 dead, 7 injured

  • “The former employee who shot and killed eight people at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis was interviewed by FBI agents last year, after his mother called police to say that her son might commit ‘suicide by cop,’ the bureau said Friday.”

• 2021/05/26 - San Jose, California - 10 dead

  • “U.S. Customs officers had previously detained the man who killed nine people in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday and found that he professed a hatred of his workplace where the shooting occurred, according to a Department of Homeland Security memo.”

• 2021/12/28 - Denver and Lakeland, Colorado - 6 dead, 1 injured

  • “According to records shared with Rolling Stone by the Denver Police Department, a German citizen named Andre Thiele reached out to them in January 2021 with an urgent tip, warning that McLeod’s violent writing led him to believe he intended on carrying it out in real life. He says he simultaneously sent the same tip to the FBI.”

  • “He engaged in threats against another author that landed him a visit from the FBI, according to one Twitter user in June 2020…On a Twitter page in the name Jack Three, McLeod wrote about this incident in June 2020. ‘As a jounalist -Jack 3- found out that Travis called the FBI on @mcclay_roman. Has anyone upbraided @MorlockP for calling himself an AnCap whilst also calling The FBI to settle his disputes? How @NoLongerBennett @vlatko can support this Yankee Fraud is God’s own private mystery,’ McLeod wrote.”

    

• 2022/02/19 - Portland, Oregon - 1 dead, 5 injured

  • “A Portland man accused of shooting into a peaceful crowd in February was contacted months before the shooting by the FBI, due to concerns about his state of mind and potential for violence, according to his former roommate and a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.”

• 2022/05/14 - Buffalo, New York - 10 dead, 3 injured

  • “Law enforcement officers are investigating whether a retired federal agent had about 30 minutes advance notice of a white supremacist's plans to murder Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, two law enforcement officials told The Buffalo News. 

    Authorities believe the former agent – believed to be from Texas – was one of at least six individuals who regularly communicated with accused gunman Payton Gendron in an online chat room where racist hatred was discussed, the two officials said.

    The two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the investigation stated these individuals were invited by Gendron to read about his mass shooting plans and the target location about 30 minutes before Gendron killed 10 people at Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue on May 14.”

• 2022/11/19 - Colorado Springs, Colorado - 5 dead, 17 injured

  • “As part of the FBI’s probe, the agency said it coordinated with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, which had responded to the June 18, 2021, call from Aldrich’s grandparents and arrested Aldrich, now 22, on felony menacing and kidnapping charges. But about a month after getting the tip, the FBI closed its assessment of Aldrich, who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.

    ‘With state charges pending, the FBI closed its assessment on July 15, 2021,’ the FBI said.

    Those charges were later dropped for unknown reasons. Under Colorado law, cases that are dismissed by either prosecutors or a judge are automatically sealed to prevent people from having their lives ruined if they do not end up being prosecuted. Authorities have cited the law in refusing to answer questions about the case but a coalition of media organizations, including the AP, has asked the court to unseal the records. A hearing is planned for Thursday.

    A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, Sgt. Jason Garrett, declined to comment on the FBI’s statement or on whether his agency had any tips about Aldrich before their 2021 arrest, citing the sealing law.”

• 2023/02/15 to 16 - Los Angeles, California - 2 injured

  • “A man charged with the hate-motivated shootings of two Jewish men in Los Angeles was on the FBI’s radar before the attacks, Los Angeles Police Chief Michel Moore said.

    In the year before the shootings, Jaime Tran had been charged with carrying a loaded firearm and was investigated after threatening and racist messages were sent to former dental school classmates, according to court records and interviews.

    How Tran slipped through the FBI’s threat-tracking system despite suggestions that he posed a considerable, and perhaps deadly, danger remains under investigation by the FBI, said Moore and other officials.”

• 2023/05/06 - Allen, Texas - 9 dead, 7 injured

  • A Texas database shows that Mauricio Garcia’s first security job (after leaving the Army due to unspecified mental health issues) was with a firm called Ruiz Protective Service, Inc., founded and owned by an FBI agent.

Acknowledgments: My sincerest gratitude to Twitter user @m4chfive for the thumbnail image I use in the preview for this post. And also thank you to everyone who tweeted me examples over the years that eventually made their way into this post, I’m sure there were many.