There are always those little “sacrifices” that “have to be made” when it comes to the conspiracist mindset of mass killers. Little people. Ordinary people. People you and I and everyone else knows, somewhere, who become their victims.
The killers don’t know these people. To them they are “sheeple,” hapless pawns in the vast conspiracy ruling the world. They might as well be conspirators themselves. Maybe some of them are.
Something like that was what Stephen Paddock, whose contempt for the “sheeple” was remarked by several people who knew him, was thinking the night of October 1, 2017, as he surveyed the crowd that gathered for the huge, week-long country music festival taking place next to the Sunset Strip, right below the suite of rooms he had rented three days before in the Mandalay Bay hotel.1
It was quite a view. In fact, he could take it in from two entirely different angles from the two adjoining rooms.
________
At first, Jenna thought someone had tossed out some firecrackers in the middle of the Jason Aldean performance. An obnoxious drunken guy who had been annoying the hell out of her suddenly dropped to the ground. She thought he had just passed out. He hadn’t.2
Then there were more pops, and she could see people falling in front of her, one after another.
“I don’t know how long it was, but I didn’t put the two together,” she recalls now. “To me they were separate situations. Someone threw firecrackers, which was annoying, and then the drunken man fell. And no one was screaming. I would say people were kind of looking around, but Jason Aldean did not stop singing.
“And then there was the second part when he shot again, and many more people fell. You could see the crowd and they looked like little dominoes going down.
“That’s where Jason Aldean stopped singing.”
Jenna and her childhood friend Sammi were not first timers at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas that October 1. They had attended the same three-night event two years before. In between, Jenna had given birth to a little blond-haired baby girl, a bright-eyed chip off her mama’s block, who was now ten months old, and in the care of her grandmother back home in Tacoma, Washington.
Like Jenna, Sammi had graduated college and moved on to the working world, too. The week in Vegas had been a chance to taste their old lives again, maybe one last time. So Jenna left the baby, Camden, with her own mother, and flew off for an autumn music fling.
“Sam Hunt was who I really wanted to see, and then Eric Church,” she recalls. “So we had already seen them the previous nights. So Sunday night we were only there to see Jason Aldean.”
Before the show, they hit a couple of casinos. Sammi’s gambling luck changed everything and may have saved their lives. “We first went to the Luxor where there’s this fish game that she just loves,” Jenna recalls. It was just across Sunset Boulevard from the concert venue.
“She said she just wanted to put $10 in and then we can go over there, because every night we had gotten up right close to the stage—not that we could touch him, but maybe four rows back. And $10 turned into $100, and we were there for over an hour.
“So we showed up probably fifteen minutes before he started, and that’s why we ended up kind of farther back,” she says.
Now, people were falling in front of her, some not far away, and the popping sounds kept coming. “I just kind of looked at Sammi and I was like, that’s a fucking gun,” she remembers. “Someone’s shooting people. And it finally occurred to me what we heard thirty seconds prior was a gun, too, so this is someone shooting, twice now. And I knew it was not like a pistol. I knew that it was something automatic and big.
“People around us had hit the ground. At that point, everyone kind of went down. Some people just ducked. Other people had fallen or gotten hit.
“I just went down. Because that’s your human instinct, I guess, to get closer to the ground.”
Her lifelong friend then probably saved her life again: Sammi made her get up and flee. “She said, ‘We need to run.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think we should run.’ And she said, ‘We have to fucking run.’ And I was super scared. I didn’t want to run because at that point, it seemed like the shooter was among us, so I didn’t want to run into him. I couldn’t tell—which way is he coming from?
“People all over are falling, so I don’t know if he’s over by us. Someone got shot right by us. But then I could see people screaming on the other side of the stage, so I had no idea where the gunfire was coming from.
“So I said, ‘I don’t think we should run.’ And she said, ‘We will fucking die here.’ And I said, ‘Okay.’” Jenna got up and they took off away from the stage, toward the back of the venue.
“Basically the only reason I ran is that she started to. I was like, ‘Well, I don’t want to die alone, I guess.’”
Ironically, it was mere moments after the two of them start running away that they were separated. They had played soccer as teammates since grade school and into high school, and both were good athletes, though Jenna was known as the slower of the two. Running with the crowd away from the gunfire to the right and past the concessions, Jenna sprinted through the pack. “I just booked it a little bit faster I guess,” she says.
A woman who had been running alongside her suddenly took a shot through the neck in front of Jenna. She “whipped around and went down,” as though someone had cut the strings on a marionette.
“It was literally like it just went through and whipped her whole body around and she went down. And I was just thinking, ‘I just have to keep running, just have to keep running.’”
She ran outside the venue over a cyclone fence that had been toppled by panicked concertgoers as they fled. Out on the street, however, she instinctively took cover behind a five-foot-high transformer that shielded her momentarily. She pulled out her cell phone and called her mother back in Tacoma, who promptly picked up.
“After I saw that girl fall, I was like, I’m probably not going to survive this,” she says. “I don’t even know where I’m running to. So I called her when I was definitely behind the transformer. And I said, ‘I need you to take care of Camden. I need you to let her know that I love her.’ And she was kind of confused: ‘Well, where is the shooter? Or, where’s Sammi? What’s going on?’
“And I said, “I can’t explain everything but I need you to know this. And I don’t think I’m going to . . . I don’t know where to go. But I don’t know if I’ll make it.’ Because at that point I’d seen . . . I mean, there were just dead bodies everywhere, some of them just when I was running past—I don’t know if they were dead or just lying there.
“And so it was in mind—I still have a ways to run, to where I don’t know, or if I’m going to get hit here, but I need to at least get this out of the way. For me, I just had a real urgency—like any parent, I’m sure—there was a sense of urgency to tell my mom to take care of Camden. In hindsight, it’s like, of course she would have. But it was the most important thing, just to get confirmation that she will take care of her and that she’ll raise her to know that I loved her.
“And for me, once that was done, I was able to start thinking a little more clearly. OK, now let’s see if we can survive this.”
Across the street from the transformer was the local Hooters franchise, and she dashed over to it and inside. That’s when it hit her that Sammi was not with her and nowhere in sight. So she called her mother again, and told her she didn’t know where her friend was. But her mother calmly reassured her: “No, we’ve heard from Sammi.”
“Tell her to come to Hooters, it’s the closest place,” Jenna answered.
Jenna wandered through the first-floor casino at the restaurant, which was a vacant madhouse of toppled machines and tables. Finally, she found refuge in a walk-in cooler in the kitchen. What she did not know was that by this point she was herself drenched in blood from the head down, none of it her own.
“So I ran because they were holding the kitchen door open as an access door, and I ran in and they were kind of shuffling people into the freezer. And the woman next to me was holding a woman next to her who had a cut or had been shot. And that was kind of shooting blood, too.” A woman there asked Jenna where she had been hit; she answered, “I don’t think I’ve been hit.”
The scene was fraught with the lethal unknown and all the wild misinformation that accompanies it: Death had descended on all of them from some place they could not see and they had run, but none of them believed there was only one gunman. The shots rattled around the plaza and they came from different angles, and Jenna thought it seemed as though a team of terrorists was shooting at the crowd. Her perception was widely shared.
Once inside the restaurant and locked down in the walk-in cooler, the panic began to set in. Misinformation was running rampant—people inside the cooler believed there was an active shooter inside the hotel. “Every time someone came into the kitchen, they thought it might be the shooter and there was a big commotion,” Jenna recalls. “And that’s when I kind of had a moment where I could think: ‘OK, if the shooter does come in, we’re all sitting here like a little bunch of ducks. This isn’t a good hiding spot.’
“So I announced, ‘I’m leaving.’ And I remember, the lady next to me was kind of motherly. She was, ‘No, you can’t leave, you can’t go out there.’ And I was, ‘I can’t stay here.’” Jenna left and returned to the vacant casino floor, trying to find a hiding place.
It turned out that Sammi had hit Hooters running and fled to the upper floors immediately, finding refuge in one of the rooms on the fourth floor, and her mother texted Jenna that she could find her friend there. At first she couldn’t get an elevator because they had stopped working and she was advised not to take the stairs, but after a while, the elevators returned to service and she was able to get to the fourth floor.
Jenna ran down the halls screaming her friend’s name: “Sammi!” No one answered. Then, a man opened his door and told her, “Okay, you need to get in here. There’s a shooter out there.” Jenna began: “Is my friend in your room? Her name is Sammi and—” The man stopped her: “No, but you need to get in here, there is a shooter in this hotel.” So she went in, he closed the door behind her, and she joined the fifteen or so people who had already taken refuge in the ordinary little room.
“Everybody had these injuries, and so all of a sudden these women start coming up to me and begin taking off my dress and stuff. And I’m like, ‘What are you doing? Stop!’ They’re saying, ‘No, honey, you’ve been hit. We need to figure out where you’ve been hit. She’s a nurse.’ But I told them, I haven’t been hit.” They persisted: “You’re in shock, you’ve been hit.”
“So they take me into the bathroom, and at that point I knew I had been hit, because I looked in the mirror, and I look like Carrie. There’s blood on my face and stuff and everywhere else. So suddenly I’m just thinking, OK, maybe I am hit. Even though it feels like I’ve been down in the lobby for an hour and I never felt like I was hit.
“And so anyway, they get me in the shower, and they’re literally spraying me off with my dress on, and I’m thinking, this is lovely.” The women washed her down and found a wound in her leg—a graze with flecks of shrapnel in it that they removed and cleaned. But it wasn’t large enough to have drenched her in blood. The man whose room they were hiding in gave her some warm socks.
They were safe, but in the swirl of panic and misinformation, the hysteria became relentless. Someone in the room tied the sheets together so people could climb down to a courtyard below in the event the shooter came to their door. Everyone was certain that killers were roaming the hallways of the Hooters Casino Hotel.
Jenna finally managed to connect with Sammi, who was hiding in another room on the same floor. Their respective hosts accompanied them to a halfway point, and then Sammi came back to the room where Jenna had found refuge.
“And that’s the first time that I felt like we might get through this,” Jenna says, “because I was sure I’d never see Sammi again, regardless whether it was her or me. So when I saw her, I felt as though, OK, there might be the light at the end of tunnel. And so this was probably an hour and a half in and there was still nothing on the news. And then, finally, we got the news on the TV and they started to give kind of a report. And that’s when it felt like, ‘OK, they’re taking care of this.’”
As the night went on, it became evident that the shooting had ceased and that police had the situation largely under control—not to mention that much of what they had been hearing throughout the night had been misinformation that only heightened the chaos. The local media had also contributed to it, spreading unconfirmed rumors, including a report of bombs in the basements of the hotels.
“It’s just crazy because really I was only in danger two minutes, basically. But I felt in danger for three hours . . . just sure I was going to die. Like saying my goodbyes to my family. In hindsight, I think that’s one of the hardest parts of the process—realizing you didn’t have to be panicked for that long.”
The sheer chaos and terror of the scene had spread confusion like wildfire, including among police, who had great difficulty figuring out where the gunfire was coming from. There were reports it was coming from the Luxor casino resort, the great glass pyramid that is next door to both the Mandalay Bay resort and the concert venue; other reports suggested it was coming from the festival grounds. Finally, police had observed the flashes of gunfire that were emanating from the thirty-second floor of the Mandalay and dispatched a tactical squad to put an end to it.3
Stephen Paddock had already had an encounter with a Mandalay security guard named Jesus Campos, who had gone to the thirty-second floor in response to an open-door alert and promptly found he couldn’t enter through an access door because Paddock had screwed it shut with a metal bracket. Entering through another door, Campos went to the door of the room where Paddock was waiting with his arsenal of fourteen AR-15s equipped with bump stocks that enabled him to fire them like automatic weapons, along with eight AR-10s, a revolver, and multiple one hundred–round magazines loaded with ammunition. When Campos knocked, Paddock opened fire through the door.4
One of the rounds caught Campos in the thigh, and he took refuge in an alcove. Inside, Paddock took a hammer and bashed out the windows of both suites he had rented. A Mandalay maintenance man named Steve Schuck approached his door about that time and barely evaded another round of gunfire. Campos, from his alcove, warned him to take cover, which he did. Then Schuck got on his radio and warned the hotel’s security office about the shooting on floor thirty-two.
Ranging from room to room with his weapons, Paddock had unleashed a relentless fusillade of more than eleven hundred high-velocity rifle rounds into the audience gathered below him. Then, just as suddenly, he had stopped. When the tactical team came to his door about ten minutes after he had first opened fire, the gunfire had ceased; when the team broke through an hour later, he was already long dead from a self-inflicted gunshot.5
Fifty-eight people died at the Route 91 festival that day, thirty-six of them women. Another 851 people were injured, about half of them with gunshot and shrapnel wounds. Hundreds more were injured in the scramble to escape—broken legs, torn ligaments, deep cuts.6
There were thousands of survivors that day. They all endured the same trauma—and all of them are still in various stages of recovery. Many, like Jenna, receive therapeutic treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Despite the shooter having been taken out, the chaos continued for hours afterward as reports poured in of shooters at other hotels, including the Hooters where Jenna and Sammi had taken refuge. Eventually, as the morning light grew brighter outside and it became clear that things were safe again, the two of them wandered back downstairs, out of the casino, and onto the streets again. They navigated their way back to their hotel, showered and changed, then caught the 11:00 a.m. flight home to SeaTac airport just as they had planned all along.
Camden was waiting for Jenna. It was a heartfelt embrace, but it took Jenna a while before she could hug her daughter for as long as she wanted. In her mind, she had already died and left her little girl behind, and now it felt like a betrayal for which she could not forgive herself.
That was just the beginning of her journey back. Three years later, she is still traveling it.
“Now I live thinking it’s going to happen everywhere,” Jenna says. “I don’t think I’m entirely wrong. I think that because of the way that things have been going, people just shoot other people in Walmarts these days. So I don’t go to Walmart. I do avoid Walmart.”
She says she still finds herself affected “in strange ways,” adding that she keeps wondering if or when things will start getting better. “He didn’t take away a day, he didn’t take away a week—he’s taken so much joy from my life, and that’s the hardest part.
“I drive by the school where kids are playing and I can’t have a nice thought like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to drive past this elementary and see Camden playing out there.’ No. I have to think, ‘Oh, it would be so easy for someone to hop the fence and just kill all those kids.’
“That’s what I’ve been robbed of. It’s hard—like just having nice thoughts, it’s hard to have nice thoughts to think they get ruined by such a horrible thing. I think that’s what is the hardest part.
“I can walk through what happened with anybody; it’s not traumatic to go through that for me anymore. It’s what I’ve been left with that’s so destructive.”
Even having the blessing of a happy-go-lucky toddler in her life becomes a kind of curse: “I mean, I think it helps to have [Camden] in my life, but I think that she is also a source of my worry. I think I’d have less worry if it was, ‘Oh, if I get shot in this movie theater, my parents will be sad, my brother will be sad, but no one needs me.’ So I think having someone that needs you almost makes it worse because you’re thinking, ‘Someone needs me out there.’”
As is so often the case with trauma, it actually hits the hardest at quiet moments when she’s not busy and it blindsides her. “I don’t look forward to lying in bed at night,” Jenna says. “After this, I would never want to go to bed and not go to sleep for an hour because I don’t want that time alone with myself to think about things because I know where I’m going to go. So I’ll either read or watch TV to the point where I can barely keep my eyes open. So then I don’t even have the ability to sit there and have some sort of deep thought.
“Because if I start thinking—why do these things happen in the world? It’s just too much. Because there’s no answer.”
________
In an ironic twist, the survivors of the Route 91 massacre, as well as the families of the victims, soon found themselves victimized a second time by the same universe of conspiracy theories that had fueled the mass death in the first place.
Misinformation had been rampant throughout the night, and it continued into the next day and then into the following week. A thread at the alt-right-friendly 4chan /pol/ message board misidentified the shooter, describing him as a registered Democrat;7 this misinformation quickly spread to other right-wing sites, such as Gateway Pundit. A fake news site called Your News Wire reported a second gunman firing from Mandalay’s fourth floor.8 A Russian news agency, Sputnik, falsely reported that the FBI had identified the shooter as part of a terrorist group;9 still other false reports indicated the shooter was a member of the antifascist movement.10
But that was just the beginning.
The conspiracy theories about what happened in Vegas that night began spreading widely through the usual rumor mills, particularly Infowars and its dozens of YouTube imitators whose ability to attract audiences usually depends on their ability to be outrageous. Soon, the narrative in conspiracy land was set: this was a false flag operation by government agencies designed to provide the government an excuse to take away their weapons.
They couldn’t have known that this was precisely the same narrative that Stephen Paddock believed—namely, that his attack would inspire an extreme government crackdown that would reveal its tyranny.
The day after the massacre, Alex Jones speculated that it had been perpetrated by his usual menu of favorite villains: Islamic State, antifascists, leftists, Communists, and globalists. On his Infowars show, Jones went even further, warning his audience that liberals were going to be killing them.11
The enemy’s engaging us. Everybody needs to be packing, like I told you on Friday and on Sunday. Get ready—Democrats are going to be killing people, a lot of folks. And obviously, just like you don’t see conservatives going out and doing mass shootings, they don’t want to blame the Second Amendment, they don’t want to go out and kill people.
It’s almost always drug-head Democrats, devil worshippers, you name it. That’s their M.O. The Democrats know when they mass kill now, they know to not say they’re Democrat operatives. They just want to use that to get the Second Amendment and get a civil war going.
According to Jones, the whole event was part of a scheme to cow the American public into accepting sweeping gun controls: “With this event and this attack, the leftists, the globalists, the social engineers are going to use those dear lives of those poor people who were snuffed out to try to wound what’s left of our republic and complete our journey into disarmament,” he warned, claiming that comments after the shootings by Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton were proof that they intended to start a “race war in America.”
Although Jones had promoted the idea of a looming civil war for decades, his projection-fueled rhetoric reached stochastic terror levels as the broadcast continued:
This is a leftist Democratic Party operation, with mainstream media, corporate media hyping the climate of “kill the Republicans, kill the white people.”
They’ve gotten so radicalized with their own propaganda that they’re believing all this stuff. And then when their folks go out and kill, they cover it up, and they blame it on the victims.
. . . They’re getting ready for war! And in full spectrum dominance, they’re going to carry out the attacks, and then they’re going to turn around and blame us and say our rights and our freedoms are to blame! Get it? That’s twenty-first-century warfare. You carry out the attack, and then you blame your enemy, who you just killed.
Near the end, he concluded with a red-faced rant warning his audience that their “globalist” enemies intended to round them up in concentration camps and murder them en masse, with a flourish worthy of Slim Pickens:
You think you’re hunting us? We’re going to destroy you politically. And we’re going to hold our fire. But you watch, they’re going to false flag even bigger now. They’re going for total broke to break your will. And if they do that, then they’re gonna put fifty million people in forced-labor camps. That’s mainstream news. And they can’t wait to give every one of these little Communists time with your wife and kids in some dungeon. ’Cause that’s what they want.
I’m not kiddin’. They’re comin’. You wanted to see the fight for America, you’re living it, 2017, baby! This is it! Toe-to-toe combat with the globalists, politically.12
The conspiracy theorists immediately began claiming that the victims weren’t really victims but instead paid “crisis actors” working on behalf of a “globalist” conspiracy. That’s when the death threats started.
Braden Matejka, a thirty-year-old from British Columbia, caught a bullet in the back of his head that night when he and his girlfriend, Amanda Homulos, turned to run away. However, he was lucky: the shot only grazed his skull and knocked him down. He found himself in a hospital room recovering the next week, and TV crews visited. Both he and Homulos gave interviews describing how happy they were to be alive and how fortunate they felt.13
Soon there were supportive posts on Facebook, but then everything took a turn to the dark side. Strangers began showing up in the comments making threats and accusing the couple and their family of being liars.
“Obviously a TERRIBLE CRISIS ACTOR,” wrote one named Samantha. “HE’S SCAMMING THE PUBLIC. . . . This was a government set up.”
“YOUR A LIAR AND THEFT PIECE OF CRAP,” wrote another named Karen.
“You’ll pay on the other side,” said a user named Mach. Others called Braden a “LYING BASTARD,” “scumbag govt actor,” and “fuckin FRAUD,” while one user named Josh wrote: “I hope someone comes after you and literally beats the living fuck outa you.”
“You are a lying piece of shit and I hope someone truly shoots you in the head,” a commenter wrote to Matejka on Facebook. “Your soul is disgusting and dark! You will pay for the consequences!” said another.
“There are all these families dealing with likely the most horrific thing they’ll ever experience, and they are also met with hate and anger and are being attacked online about being a part of some conspiracy,” Taylor Matejka, Braden’s brother, told the Guardian. “It’s madness. I can’t imagine the thought process of these people. Do they know that we are actual people?”
“It makes you angry,” said Rob McIntosh, fifty-two, who suffered chest and arm wounds at the massacre yet was subsequently accused of faking his injuries. “You’ve already been through something that’s traumatic and terrible, and you have someone who is attacking your honesty. You don’t even have the opportunity to respond.”14
Taylor Matejka said nothing seemed to work when he tried responding to the conspiracy theorists in person: “I’d be happy to talk to these people, but it seems there’s no reasoning. A really sad part of this is that a lot of these people think they’re fighting the good fight and exposing truth.”
Jenna encountered similar people in her mother’s social circle on Facebook. “It wasn’t like a conspiracy group, but they were just saying like, ‘what’s the funniest conspiracy that you believe in?’ And . . . some of them were funny. Like—oh—‘I believe reptiles run the government’ and it’s like . . . ‘the Titanic was switched.’ It’s . . . kind of fun. And then it started to get into 9/11, and Sandy Hook, or Vegas, or Holocaust deniers.
“And I got so heated—like to the point where I was shaking and crying—because it was these whackadoodles who believe the craziest things. They don’t believe Sandy Hook happened and basically were saying the same thing—that everyone there was paid actors. And I lost it.
“So someone said, ‘Oh, the Las Vegas shooting didn’t happen the way they said. No one was up in the hotel. The shooter was down below.’ And that it was all government driven—that there were multiple shooters, there’s proof.
“I understand where people get worked into these beliefs, but this person insisted that the victims were paid actors. And I said, ‘Okay, well, I can tell you that it wasn’t. I definitely was not paid anything. So I’m still waiting on that check.’” The woman remained insistent, though, eventually concluding that “we’ll just never know what really happened.
“It was just so frustrating. You can’t even reason with someone like that. And when they get enough people to believe it, then they just feed off each other, it seems like.”
Jenna used to dabble in conspiracy theories a little herself, just for fun. Now she runs away from them, because she knows firsthand that they arise in a vacuum of ignorance. “These people who believe like Sandy Hook or Vegas didn’t happen—I doubt any of them have spoken to anyone that was there. So they can say whatever they want: ‘Oh, well, it’s because everyone’s a paid actor.’ And I’m, ‘Talk to me, I’m right here.’
“I just don’t think they want to know the truth—or it’s not that they don’t want to know the truth, I think it’s that they think they know the truth, and it would be hard to be faced with something else that then they would be able to reconcile with the story that they’ve created.”
The official investigation took ten months, but in the end, it provided no resolution for the victims, the survivors, or their families. Las Vegas Metro’s official report in August 2018, despite the abundance of evidence of Stephen Paddock’s conspiracism, was unable to determine any kind of motivation. It pointed to his lack of organizational affiliations, the absence of any kind of manifesto, and no evidence of a conspiracy before concluding: “What we have been able to answer are the questions of who, what, when, where and how . . . what we have not been able to definitively answer is why Stephen Paddock committed this act.” The FBI’s report five months later likewise concluded that “there was no single or clear motivating factor.”15
That meant that the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in American history was committed for reasons that law enforcement officials couldn’t explain—to the victims, their families, the survivors, or to the public. The conspiracy theories that Paddock believed in, in this calculus, could not count as a motive. And so his victims just became the inert things Paddock himself conceived them as.
“Sacrifices.”
________
The six hundred or so teenagers who had gathered in late July 2011 for summer camp on Utoya Island—an idyllic twenty-six-acre getaway on Lake Tyri, about twenty-four miles northwest of Oslo, where the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth wing, the AUF, had for years held its annual summer training sessions for up-and-coming young political leaders—were in the kind of place where violence, especially hate-filled, relentless lethal violence, did not seem even remotely possible. It was so peaceful. So beautiful. The atmosphere at the camp, as always, was convivial and uplifting.16
All of which is a large part of why Anders Breivik chose Utoya Island as his target. It seemed so inconceivable. Certainly, what happened was.
The kids at Utoya were the nation’s future political elite, and that too is why Breivik targeted them. A number of prime ministers had attended the camp, crediting the camp with shaping their careers, and were known for returning and giving speeches. That morning of July 22, former prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland addressed the kids. Breivik originally wanted to target the camp while she was there—his plan was to behead her on video then post it on the Internet—but encountered a hitch in his plan when his departure from downtown Oslo was delayed.17
Then again, when he departed Oslo that morning, the city was in utter chaos because he had set off the truck bomb he had created in the Volkswagen Crafter van at his farm in the center of the government office district, near prime minister Jens Stoltenberg’s offices. It was a McVeigh-size blast that killed eight people.18
Most of them were government workers, including Anne Lise Holter, a fifty-one-year-old senior consultant to Stoltenberg. There was Hanna Endresen, sixty-one, a receptionist in the security department; Jon Vegard Lervag, thirty-two, a lawyer in the justice department; Ida Marie Hill, thirty-four, an adviser to the ministry of justice; Hanne Ekroll Loevlie, a thirty-year-old senior government worker originally from rural Tyristrand; twenty-six-year-old Kjersti Berg Sand, who worked on international issues in justice. A couple of random passersby—Tove Ashill Knutsen, fifty-six, who was on her way to a subway station, and Kai Hauge, thirty-two, who owned a nearby bar and restaurant—also were killed. Another 209 people were injured, twelve of them severely. However, none of the government main ministers was among the injured, including Stoltenberg.19
Many of the teens on Utoya that day had parents who worked in Oslo’s government district, so when word of the bombing reached the island, the camp suspended activities so attendees could contact their parents. In the meantime, they were told that a police officer from the mainland was on his way over on the small ferry that serviced the camp.
That officer was actually Breivik, dressed in a police uniform with tactical armor and carrying high-powered rifles in cases.20 He had driven to Utoya in his mother’s vehicle and arrived at the ferry dock, requesting it be summoned to fetch him, telling them his name was “Martin Nilsen.” But camp director Monica Bøsei became suspicious on the ferry ride back and summoned security director Trond Berntsen when they reached shore. When Berntsen asked to see some ID, Breivik pulled out his pistol and dispatched both Berntsen and Bøsei on the spot.21
It was done out of view of the teenagers, however, so when Breivik walked up to the open field where they were assembled, he asked them to gather around him so he could debrief them on the bombing in Oslo. When they had encircled him, he opened fire with one of the high-powered rifles. The kids screamed and scattered, and when the open space had cleared a minute or so later, there were only tents and fallen teenagers who had been shot as they fled.22
Breivik then walked into the camp’s café/canteen, where thirteen teens had taken refuge. He burst in the doors and announced: “You will die today! Marxists, liberals, members of the elite!” Then he began shooting all of them, first with a pistol, then finishing them each with a shotgun blast to the head. Afterward, he went outside and finished off the teens who had fallen in the open field outside in identical fashion.23
For the next hour or so, Breivik conducted a systematic search for camp attendees around the rest of the island. He tried getting into the schoolhouse building and found it was locked; after firing a couple of rounds through the lock without it budging, he moved on to the kids hiding in the woods. His rifle was loaded with special hollow-point bullets designed to cause the most damage to his victims’ internal organs and body tissue.24
As he walked along, he shouted: “You’re going to die today, Marxists!” And when he found them—often clustered together in protective huddles—he cold-bloodedly opened fire. As he reached the island’s edge, he found more of them similarly clustered beneath rock outcroppings, at which point he simply mowed them down.25
Many of the teens decided to try swimming for it. Breivik began firing at them from shore, shouting as he did so. Others swam back to shore when they realized they couldn’t make it, only to encounter Breivik walking up to them there and firing off more rounds from his rifle.
Police had been desperately trying to reach the island, but a variety of bureaucratic snafus prevented them from reaching Utoya until ninety minutes or so after Breivik’s arrival. When they got there, Breivik freely surrendered, smirking and telling them that all would become clear soon.26
They also found seventy-seven dead teenagers. Another 110 were injured, 55 of them with serious wounds and lifelong consequences.
“Sacrifices.”
________
Dylann Roof very nearly didn’t go through with it after meeting and spending an hour or so in Bible study with the people he had targeted for death. They were “so nice,” he later told investigators that he almost changed his mind and called off what he called his “mission.”27
His primary target was the senior pastor of the church—Emanuel Baptist AME in Charleston, South Carolina—whose Bible study sessions he had joined the evening of June 17, 2015. The pastor’s name was Reverend Clementa Pinckney,28 a man who had gained renown as national civil rights leader and had recently been in the news advocating for the use of body cameras by police officers in the wake of a highly publicized shooting of a black man in Charleston.29 Roof told investigators later that he picked Emanuel because of its long significance in the history of civil rights.
Roof entered the church around eight in the evening, dressed in a long-sleeve gray shirt and jeans with a fanny pack rotated in front, as the gathered congregants broke into groups for Bible studies. He asked for Reverend Pinckney by name and then sat next to him. For the next hour or so, a pleasant conversation about scripture commenced, and Roof appeared to be enjoying himself. But at some point around 9:00 p.m., his countenance changed, survivors said, and he suddenly pulled a pistol out of the fanny pack and shot Reverend Pinckney point-blank in the head, killing him instantly.30
Then he aimed at the eighty-seven-year-old woman across the table from him, Susie Jackson. Her nephew, twenty-six-year-old Tywanza Sanders, was seated next to her and began speaking in a calm voice to Roof, telling him he didn’t need to do this.31
“Yes I do. I have to do it,” Roof replied. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Sanders dove across the chair to protect his aunt, and Roof shot him next, then Susie Jackson. Then he systematically went around the room, shooting everyone in it, shouting: “Y’all want something to pray about? I’ll give you something to pray about.” Two survived by pretending to be dead. Roof left one person alive to act as a witness to the carnage then tried to shoot himself, but, after reloading five times, he had run out of ammunition. So he walked out of the church and into the night. He was arrested the next day in North Carolina.32
“Sacrifices.”
________
The first victims of Elliot Rodger’s rampage were two roommates with whom he shared an apartment in Isla Vista and one of their friends. It’s not clear what set the final spark, but that day—May 23, 2014—Rodger lay in wait at the apartment as each of them returned home, where he ambushed them with a large knife. He left the bodies of the roommates—Weihann “David” Wang, twenty, and Cheng Yuan “James” Hong, twenty—in their bedrooms and the corpse of their nineteen-year-old friend, George Chen, in the bathroom.33
Rodger appears to have waited several more hours in the apartment before setting out in his black BMW with his Sig Sauer P26 pistols on what appears to have been a meticulously planned mass killing. Except, of course, that it went awry almost immediately.34
The initial plan, after all, called for him to “enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB” and then to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck up, blonde slut I see inside there.” That was what he said, anyway, in the “Retribution” video he uploaded to YouTube as he drank his vanilla latte at Starbucks that evening.
That didn’t work out. He did indeed walk up to the front door of the Alpha Phi sorority house near the UCSB campus and knock on it at about 9:30 p.m. No one answered. It was getting dark.35
However, there were random people nearby on the lawns of neighboring sororities, so he began shooting at them instead—wounding three women from the Delta Delta Delta sorority, two of them fatally—before getting back in his car and peeling away.
The short remainder of Rodger’s life consisted of a mobile gun rampage from inside his car through Isla Vista. He shot and killed a man standing in front of a nearby market and then continued shooting: a man and woman standing outside a residence a short distance away, a woman waiting at a crosswalk, another woman walking along a sidewalk. He also used his car to intentionally strike several pedestrians, as well as a man riding a bicycle, all of whom were injured but survived.36
When sheriff’s deputies cornered him at an intersection, they exchanged gunfire, and Rodger suffered a wound to the hip. Still careering madly through the streets, he whipped around and took out one last bicyclist before shooting himself in the head—at which point his car veered off to the side and crashed to a halt.
All told, in addition to Elliot Rodger, there were six people killed in Isla Vista that day, and fourteen more injured, several severely.
“Sacrifices.”
________
Yonge Street is the main artery in downtown Toronto, and it’s usually packed with traffic, especially in the tony North York City Centre, where Alek Minassian drove his van and parked long enough to post his Facebook message praising the incels.
For Minassian, however, traffic was no object. Starting up the big van, he hopped the curb at Yonge and Finch Avenue and began driving at a high rate of speed down the sidewalk, mowing down every pedestrian he encountered.37 He remained on the sidewalk for several more blocks, a trail of bodies in his wake. He seemed to be aiming especially for women. One witness said that Minassian appeared to be like someone playing a video game, trying to kill as many pedestrians as possible.38
At one point the sidewalk became too narrow and he was forced back onto Yonge Street, where he remained for a couple of blocks, still careering along at high speed but without hitting anyone, until he reached Park Home Avenue. Veering back onto the sidewalk, he again began mowing people down as he encountered them.39
Minassian’s van had struck so many people that its front end was badly damaged, and it finally lurched to a stop just as he turned a corner onto the sidewalk on Poyntz Avenue. He sat inside until a police officer reached the van. When he got outside, he had something in his hand, which he pointed at the officer, screaming: “Shoot me in the head!” The officer, gun in hand, instead patiently talked him down and arrested him. Minassian still awaits trial, scheduled for November 2020.
The scene behind him: bodies strewn along the avenue, shrieking sirens, and aid workers trying to rescue the victims. There were shoes randomly tossed in the street and torn pieces of clothing and briefcases.40
The final toll: ten people killed and fifteen injured, many critically. Eight of the ten dead were women, as were twelve of the injured.
“Sacrifices.”
________
When Destinee Magnum and her Muslim friend boarded the Green Line MAX train in downtown Portland on May 26, 2017, it was just an ordinary early rush-hour ride at around 4:00 p.m. The two teenage girls, one black and outgoing and the other shy and wearing a hijab, managed to find seats out of Union Station and were quietly chatting with each other when they pulled into the station at the Lloyd Center.41
That was where Jeremy Christian got on board.
Unlike the night before, when he had harassed Demetria Hester, this train was full of people. But that didn’t stop Christian. No sooner had he boarded than he spotted Destinee and her friend, immediately standing in front of them and shouting at them about how they didn’t belong in Portland. That Muslims should die, because they had been killing Christians for hundreds of years. That the girl in the hijab should go back to Saudi Arabia.
The girls got up and fled to the back of the train, seeking another seat. Christian followed them, still shouting.42
Three men, regular commuters who had been watching the scene unfold, stepped between Christian and the two women. One of them—Rick Best, fifty-three, a Portland city employee—stood closest to Christian and tried using reason: “I know you are taxpayer, but this is not OK. You’re scaring people.” Christian kept shouting that it was about his free speech.
As they neared the next stop, Taliesen Myrddin Namkai-Meche, twenty-three, pleaded with Christian: “Please get off this train.”
Another of the trio, Micah David-Cole Fletcher, twenty-one, recognized Christian from the alt-right march the month before, when he had marched with the counterprotesters and Christian had made a scene. He tried pushing himself between Christian and the women.
“You fucking touch me again and I’ll kill you,” Christian snarled at him. At that moment he lost his balance and fell back; when he came back up, he had a knife in his hand, and he plunged it into Rick Best’s neck, then turned to Namkai-Meche and Fletcher and did the same to each of them. Then he ran from the train and away from the Hollywood station. The two dark-skinned girls fled the train, too, leaving their belongings behind.43
Rick Best bled out before help could arrive and was declared dead at the scene. Namkai-Meche, who told everyone who stopped to help that he loved them, died in the intensive-care ward at the nearby hospital. Only Fletcher, who remained in the hospital for a month recovering from his wound, survived the attack.
At his arraignment on murder and attempted murder charges—but, mysteriously, no hate-crime charges—two days later, Christian ranted behind the glass for the benefit of the press.44
“Free speech or die, Portland!” he shouted. “You got no safe place. This is America! Get out if you don’t like free speech!”
After hearing the official charges being read, he shouted again: “Death to the enemies of America! Leave this country if you hate our freedom. Death to antifa!
“You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism!”
“Sacrifices.”
________
Buckey Wolfe had made himself a kind of crude sword that he kept in the mother-in-law apartment at the back of his parents’ home in Seattle, where he lived. It was a two-edged piece of steel about four feet long, which had been sharpened at the tang end to a fine point with razor edges.45
The evening of January 6, 2019, his brother James paid a visit. They chatted for a while, and their dad handed them some food before they retreated to Buckey’s mother-in-law’s apartment.
At 6:40 p.m., Buckey called 911 and told the dispatcher that he had killed his brother by ramming the crude sword into his head.46
“Kill me, kill me, I can’t live in this reality,” he said and rambled on: “God told me he was a lizard,” he added.
When police arrived, they found James Wolfe dead inside the apartment, fatally wounded by the sword. Buckey was gone, but police found him shortly afterward, walking through the neighborhood about a mile away.
When detectives interviewed him at police headquarters, he told them “that their eyes and mouths were changing and asked if they could see lizards in the room,” according to court records.47
The Proud Boys shortly afterward issued a lengthy statement claiming that Buckey Wolfe had never been a member of their organization, claiming he had “never made it past our strict vetting protocols.”48 But in fact, nearly a year before, Wolfe had posted the certificate on his Facebook page that verified his “first degree” membership, along with multiple group shots with other Proud Boys out on the streets.49
The judge ordered Wolfe detained without bail, agreeing with prosecutors that he posed an extreme danger to the community. He awaits trial in Seattle, having been found mentally competent by the court in July 2019.
“Sacrifices.”
________
Brenton Tarrant had the ultimate alt-right massacre in mind: livestreamed, like a first-person shooter video game.50
After sending his manifesto out into the world from the car parked outside the Al-Noor mosque in Christchurch, he got out of the car and began livestreaming from the GoPro strapped to his chest. He told viewers: “Subscribe to PewDiePie!” Everything that happened during the next seventeen minutes was broadcast live on Facebook.51
And it was a horror show. Tarrant walked up to the door of the mosque and was greeted there by a worshipper who smiled and said, “Hello, brother.” He was the first to die.52
Tarrant then could be seen systematically walking through the mosque and gunning down dozens of worshippers there for Friday prayer. Viewers could see him aiming his weapon—an apparently modified semiautomatic high-powered rifle, though at other times he could be seen using both a pistol and a shotgun. All of them were being fired at people who then fell over and died.53
Most disturbingly, the videos engendered by this livestream—which were then shared globally over the Internet and became a kind of forbidden fruit after being outlawed in a number of countries, including New Zealand—were almost live-action re-creations of first-person shooter games, which often present the world to video-game players (as Tarrant himself was) from precisely this perspective.54 Tarrant clearly set up the camera perspective with the chest-level GoPro with exactly this in mind.55
When he was done at Al-Noor, Tarrant jumped in his car and headed out in a necessarily roundabout route to the city’s other mosque, with police cars screaming toward the Al-Noor mosque passing him along the way. When he finally reached the Linwood Islamic Centre, five kilometers away, about eight minutes had passed.
However, he apparently had done a poor job of scouting this location and approached it from a back door, where he was unable to gain entry. So he began firing at people through the window there, striking a number of worshippers inside.
Tarrant ran out of ammo, though, and returned to his car to fetch another weapon. When he did so, one of the Islamic Centre congregants—a forty-eight-year-old father of four named Abdul Aziz Wahabzada—whose four children were inside the mosque—ran out of the mosque with an electronic card reader the size of a small adding machine and threatened to bash Tarrant with it.56 Startled, Tarrant pulled out a gun and fired at Aziz, who ducked between cars to avoid the string of gunshots. Eventually Aziz was able to retrieve a gun that Tar-rant had abandoned when his second gun ran out of ammo. Gun in hand, Aziz chased Tarrant to his car and threw the gun through one of the car’s windows. Tarrant hit the ignition and the gas and drove away. Police arrested him a few blocks away; they believe he was on his way to a third target.57
Tarrant killed fifty-one people that day: forty-two at Al-Noor and another seven at Linwood; two of the Al-Noor wounded later died at the hospital. The slain ranged in age from three to seventy-seven. Another thirty-six were treated for gunshot wounds, a number of them life-threatening, though most survived. Fourteen others suffered shrapnel injuries.58
“Sacrifices.”