The Highland Park suspect existed in some of the darkest corners of the internet, including a secretive gore site VICE News got access to. But experts say to exercise caution before attaching any ideology to him. The young man who has confessed to killing seven people at a Fourth of July parade in a Chicago suburb on Monday was “an extremely online creature” and crafted a confounding digital footprint that experts say he wanted everyone to analyze. Besides his YouTube videos, social media profiles, and Spotify playlists, Robert E. Crimo III hung out in some of the darkest corners of the internet, areas where graphic violence and mass shooters, in particular, are romanticized. He left behind cryptic clues that researchers, journalists, and the general public have been poring over in recent days—and experts say that’s exactly what the suspect wanted. “The intention for this attack is exactly what is happening now, which is that people are going through all his digital history,” Emmi Conley, an extremism researcher at Logically, a tech company that pairs AI research with experts, told VICE News. “They’re trying to unravel some kind of puzzle. They’re trying to get into the (alleged) killer’s mind and figure out what he does, because those kinds of answers would be deeply satisfying for us. But what he laid was a breadcrumb trail; he left behind a trap for people to go digging.” Like the alleged perpetrators in the recent Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings, the man accused of killing seven people during the Fourth of July parade on Monday is a young male. Unlike the Buffalo shooter, the Highland Park shooter didn’t leave behind a screed that he wanted people to read and explain his actions. But the shooter did leave behind a massive digital footprint. An extensive review of his online activity by VICE News, including a look inside the disturbing gore forum where he posted 3,546 times since he joined in June 2020, and interviews with extremist researchers and friends of the suspect, reveals that his online activity cannot be narrowly categorized. “He embodies sort of the pop-culture image of a mass shooter,” Conley said. “For decades, especially since Columbine, the media has been talking about the idea of a dangerous level of mentally ill, confused, schizophrenic young man who doesn’t really have any intentions—, he’s just crazy, right? And this is a shooter that said, ‘OK’ and embodied that. Everything about him is confusing on purpose.”
via vice: The Highland Park Shooter Wanted Attention on His Disturbing Online Footprint