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Exactly. Even without considering the possibility that the murder is non-ideological, assassins often have incoherent worldviews that do not cleanly map to tribal politics as normally understood by the non-insane. Perhaps he believed the insurance company to be responsible for implanting a mind-control device in his brain or some other similarly schizo reason. Time will tell presumably
Like most actual assassins, I think his motive was money.
He's too cool under pressure. I don't think the gun malfunctions three out of three times, I think it was a homemade silencer or subsonic rounds that fuck up the cycling of the gun. This means he trained to do the manual cycling. He dumps a phone at the scene; I'd be willing to bet it's scrubbed of anything and this is either an explicit "fuck you" to someone or just excellent evidence hygiene with a burner. And then uses a public bike service that is known to have GPS trackers on them to escape in the most densely populated city in the US. And, as of this morning still, he has not been caught. This is a pro's pro.
And that's why the motive is probably shocking in its brutal simplicity - my money is on some internal shit at United Healthcare or something with a competitor. Tens of billions on the line etc. Remember, the CEO was in town for an investor meeting. That's a symbol and message all on its own.
Somebody went ultra greedy and decided to do this using a spreadsheet and a slide rule. That's far more terrifying that "random schizo goes bang bang"
I'm not usually conspiratorial but I wouldn't be at all surprised if this were a hit disguised as a revenge killing. The detail of the slogan scratched on the bullet casings is just that bit too melodramatic, it doesn't fit the stone cold killer vibe.
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This isn’t an insane person, though.
Insane people flail wildly in the general direction of their targets and neglect to bring the proper equipment.
This is very much not that (this person doesn’t seem surprised their pistol doesn’t cycle on its own, and that may even be on purpose since doing that makes it even quieter) especially considering the authorities haven’t caught him yet.
(And, I’m not sure they want to reveal the ability to catch him if they could do it. NSA probably could, but this was only a quasi-government actor so maybe not worth burning the latest in AI classification tech to do it; if this guy is caught, that’s going to be one hell of a parallel construction case.)
It might not be as hard to catch him as you think. The stories that broke throughout the day were kind of scattershot, but I just saw one on CBS that had a more complete reconstruction of the events. Initial reports said that the shooter escaped on a Citi bike. Assuming at the time that it was a regular pedal bike, you could probably track him down based on that, though it might take quite a lot of legwork. The CBS story said, though, that he arrived to the scene on foot, shot the guy, then ran to a docking station and picked up an ebike, which he then used to escape. These require either an app or a credit card to use, and you can already nail down the station it was taken from and the window of time when it was rented. It gets better, though. While the regular bikes don't have any kind of tracking, the ebikes do. You know know where he returned the bike to, along with the exact escape route. This can be invaluable information if you're looking for clothing, the murder weapon, or any other evidence he may have ditched along the way. I guess there's a chance he could have used a stolen credit card that wasn't cancelled yet, or a stolen phone that happened to have a Citi bike account on it, or some other way of getting the bike, but for all this guy seems to have done right, the getaway plan was fairly stupid.
You can buy stolen or cloned credit cards pretty easily, ditto for burner phones.
Would you even need to do that? Would a pre-paid card bought with cash not be able to do the trick?
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Lyft, who operates Citibike, is now saying it wasn't one of theirs. I would surmise he pre-staged a bike that looked like a Citibike and used that.
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Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon in very similar fashion in New York City and was undeniably insane with incoherent and deeply personal motives. Alternatively at times he has described the motives as due to Lennon's blasphemous statements, Lennon's hypocritical lifestyle, or to promote the book Catcher in the Rye. He had attempted suicide on numerous occasions. Despite his insanity he had planned the murder over a month in advance and flew all the way from Hawaii to do it, located John Lennon and waited outside his home until the opportunity presented itself.
agree. insanity does not mean what people often think it does . it does not mean a total lack of composure or forethought
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