Just a few hours before he opened fire in a packed Indiana food court on Sunday evening, 20-year-old gunman Jonathan Sapirman appears to have made chilling posts on 4chan that warned of his plan and invoked Nazi imagery.
Sapirman, 20, walked to the Greenwood Park Mall from his apartment on Sunday with three legally purchased guns—two assault rifles and a handgun. He spent an hour in a bathroom, then walked out into the food court and fatally shot three people, all of Hispanic origin, before 22-year-old “good Samaritan” Elisjsha Dicken shot him dead from long-range with a handgun.
Sapirman’s motive remains unclear; his family said he was being evicted from his apartment, had recently quit his warehouse job, and had been frequenting a gun range. Greenwood Police said he began buying firearms from local gun stores in March.
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A since-deleted post that appears to have been posted by Sapirman on 4chan, the online message board that has played a role in several white supremacist-inspired mass shootings, has since circulated online.
“Name is jonathan and today seems like a good day to die,” the message reads, with a time stamp of 1:13 p.m. It was accompanied by a colorized wedding photo of an Unterscharführer, a rank in the Nazi military. He opened fire at around 6 p.m. the same day.
The post also included a link to Imgur, an image-sharing site, that contained photos of a young man wearing a white button-down shirt, a black face mask, blue jeans, and a combat-style vest. In the background are two AR-15-style rifles, a handgun, and ammunition.
Greenwood Police Chief James Ison would not confirm that the posts were written by Sapirman but he told VICE and local outlet WISH-TV that investigators were “aware” of the photos and message.
“The Greenwood Police Department and FBI are working diligently to identify the source,” he told WISH-TV. “When our investigation is complete we will issue an update. There is no time frame on this update as the investigation is ongoing.”
VICE reports that the man’s outfit in the photos on Imgur matches the outfit seen in a graphic crime scene photo that has since circulated on 4chan. It shows the bloodied suspect lying dead on the tiles in Greenwood Mall with a placard that says “dead.” Ison did not dispute that photo’s authenticity to VICE, saying that police were trying to get to the bottom of where it came from.
Investigators have not alleged that Sapirman held any far-right or white supremacist ideologies. However, his three victims—married couple Pedro and Rosa Mirian Rivera de Pineda, and Victor Gomez—were of El Salvadoran and Mexican heritage, respectively, friends told WISH-TV. Greenwood is 84.5 percent white, according to census data.
Investigators said Monday that when they searched Sapirman’s apartment, they found his laptop with a can of butane in a hot oven.
He also threw his cellphone in the mall toilet before unleashing carnage. The laptop and cellphone are being further probed by the FBI.
4chan has been repeatedly criticized for being a cesspool of bigotry and a training ground for far-right conspiracy theorists. Most recently, it allegedly played a role in radicalizing the Buffalo shooter who killed 10 Black people at a grocery store in a predominately Black neighborhood in upstate New York.
