If it were a movie story, this would consist of a parallel montage between the two Americas.
At the same time that thousands of citizens gathered in the capital of the United States to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington and the famous “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King, in Jacksonville, Florida, Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21-year-old white man, left manifestos that seemed to have been written by the great wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
“I’m going to kill blacks, I hate them,” wrote that young man, according to the texts that his own parents provided to the police. “His manifestos of him are the diary of a madman, completely irrational thoughts, but he knew what he was doing, he was 100% lucid,” the county sheriff, T.K. Waters, stressed yesterday.
Palmeter, who lived with his parents, kept his word. Armed with a Glock pistol and an AR-15 rifle, decorated with a swastika, he killed three African-Americans (two men and one woman), before taking his own life, in a Dollar General discount chain store in that city to the north from Florida. And he did it in a systematic way, choosing his victims by the color of their skin, avoiding shooting at the targets who were in the establishment, Waters said at a press conference.
The sheriff offered a small sample of the security camera footage. Dressed in the paramilitary style with a bulletproof vest, mask and gloves, the author shoots at a vehicle parked at the door of that business (first victim) and it is seen how he enters, looks and takes aim. “It is a short video because the rest is not made for television or entertainment,” the police officer clarified. But he assured that, from the images, they observed that there were targets in the store, whom the gunman ruled out. Waters used the word “choose” at all times when referring to the three deceased, ages 19, 29 and 52.
“The hatred that motivated this crime adds an additional layer of pain and anguish,” he said.
“We have seen how racial hatred has grown,” Martin Luther King III, son of the mythical reverend leader, weighed this Sunday after this massacre. “We have to do something now, this is inhumane, unacceptable, it is not the United States,” he added.
“As we continue to march for freedom on Washington, hate actors continue to carry out the white supremacist agenda in Jacksonville, killing black citizens in the name of an era we refuse to return to,” he lamented. Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, the organization that fights for civil rights.
Sheriff Waters, who is African-American, explained that Palmeter legally purchased the pistol and rifle, and that the sellers did the right thing. In his responses, he exonerated the weapons and blamed the person. “This was a bad guy. The problem is the individual, weapons are only the tools of the bad guys to do horrible things,” he said. He also remarked that there was “no red flag” warning, “we had no information that this could happen.” The gunman had no criminal record, despite the fact that in 2017, at the age of 15, he was under observation for 72 hours for a complaint of domestic violence due to a call from his brother.
According to Waters, the assailant passed by Edward Waters University, a historic center for black students. There he showed no intention of “exercising violence despite proximity to people who could be his target.” A video on TikTok captured how he dressed to kill.
So, he headed to the store. When she had already left three deceased, Palmeter sent a message to his father. He asked her to use a screwdriver and access his room. It’s what the father did, who found the racist manifestos and a suicide note on his computer. “There is no explanation,” Waters reiterated, “for the actions of this nauseating ideology.”
