On the heels of the mass shooting three weeks ago in Santa Barbara, the mass shooting last week at Seattle Pacific University, and an armed assault on a Georgia courthouse last Friday, five people died in Las Vegas yesterday as a male-female pair killed two police officers and a random civilian before apparently turning their weapons on themselves inside a Walmart.
The Las Vegas Sun reports that the police officers were killed around 11:30 a.m. at a CiCi’s Pizza restaurant, after which the suspects took the officers’ ammunition and ran to the Walmart.
There, the assailants shot and killed at least one person inside the front door of the store. They exchanged gunfire with police inside the store before the female suspect shot the male suspect and then killed herself.
The Sun says the suspects were known to neighbors as erratic white supremacists:
Residents at an apartment complex where it appeared the two lived together said they had a reputation for spouting racist, anti-government views, bragging about their gun collection and boasting that they’d spent time at Cliven Bundy’s ranch during a recent standoff there between armed militia members and federal government agents.
The duo also told people they planned to commit a mass shooting, said Brandon Moore, a resident of the complex.
“They were handing out white-power propaganda and were talking about doing the next Columbine,” Moore said.
The Sun reports that the suspects were “known to walk around town dressed as the Batman comic book characters The Joker and Harley Quinn,” while the Las Vegas Review-Journal spoke to a neighbor who said the male attacker “often wore camouflage or dressed as Peter Pan as a Fremont Street Experience street performer.”
The Review-Journal reports that the suspects draped a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag over the bodies of the police officers they killed. The flag, which dates to the Revolutionary War, is used as a symbol by many right-wing anti-government groups.
