A researcher with the well-respected group Bellingcat has posted to Twitter what he says are images from the Allen, Texas mass shooter’s account on a Russian social media platform. On Saturday a gunman shot and killed eight people between the ages of 5 and 61 at an outlet mall.
The posts and photos are filled with unmistakeable Nazi or neo-Nazi symbols and images. One photo even has the word “Nazi” in it. Another, “white supremacist.”
Bellingcat is a Netherlands-based investigative journalism organization founded in 2014. The researcher, Aric Toler, is Bellingcat’s Director of Training & Research. He was profiled by VANITY FAIR last month after helping The New York Times find the suspected Pentagon leaker.
“Took a while, but I found the Odnoklassniki profile of the Allen. [sic] TX shooter described in this NYT article,” Toler writes. Odnoklassniki is a Russian social media platform.
“Investigators trying to learn why a gunman fatally shot at least eight people at a Texas mall are examining a social media profile, rife with hate-filled rants against women and Black people, that they believe belonged to the gunman,” The Times article begins. “The profile, found on the social media site OK.RU, matches the gunman’s birthday and refers to a motel where he was staying before the shooting. The profile also includes language praising Hitler, with references to neo-Nazi websites like The Daily Stormer.”
Toler links to a YouTube account he says is the shooter’s. It has just one video, titled, “PsycoVision face reveal M Garcia.”
The suspect has been identified by police as 33-year old Mauricio Garcia. That account’s logo is a yellow smiley-face with a “Hitler” mustache.
“Worth noting that he uploaded this video before the shooting, and scheduled for it to be published onto his YouTube channel after the shooting. In a March post, he linked to the same YouTube channel, so it’s definitely his,” Toler writes later, linking to that YouTube video.
“At the shooting on Saturday, the gunman was wearing a patch that said ‘RWDS,’ an abbreviation known to stand for ‘Right Wing Death Squad,’ according to one official,” The Times also reports. “The phrase harks back to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s violent right-wing regime in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. The Pinochet government was notorious for assembling death squads that murdered their leftist enemies.”
Toler posted an image of a bullet-proof vest with a RWDS patch and logos from “The Punisher.”
One image Toler posted shows a shirtless man’s torso, with a very large Nazi swastika tattoo on his left upper chest, and an even larger Nazi “SS” tattoo on his right bicep. There is also a large tattoo in the shape of the state of Texas, with the word “Texas” written on it, on his right shoulder.
It has been viewed 2.5 million times in just two hours.
“I wonder if the Allen, TX [shooter] was a white supremacist?” Toler sarcastically asks. “If only there was a post that he made himself where we could find out, in context of him being Latino himself.”
He includes a screenshot, presumably from Garcia’s social media page, that shows drawing of a forked road, on side reads “car black” the other, “become white supremacist.” The caption reads in part, “I think I’ll take my chances with the white supremacist.”
Toler also posts four images of what appear to be a Nazi wedding, captioned, “My kind of people.” Toler, again sarcastically, writes: “I guess we’ll never know if this guy was a liberal or fascist or anything else, oh well.”
Toler also suggests Garcia was a “violent incel,” saying the term “has lost a lot of meaning in the last few years” because it has been “so overused. But yeah it fits here.”
Pointing to TikTok images or videos, Toler writes: “The Allen shooter was apparently a @timcast fan.” @timcast is former VICE journalist Tim Pool. The Southern Poverty Law Center in 2021 described Pool as “a pro-Trump social media personality,” who “uses his YouTube show to showcase far-right extremists such as Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and the neo-Nazi collaborator Jack Posobiec. Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), a non-partisan group that includes researchers from Stanford University and the University of Washington, listed Pool among a group of verified Twitter ‘superspreaders’ who pushed disinformation to Twitter following the 2020 election.”
Responding to someone who claims he has not proven these are from the shooter, Toler writes: “He literally posted multiple identification cards with his name and face, pictures of receipts with his name and city, and photos of the mall where he carried out his mass shooting a few weeks before he did it. He also posted a manifesto/suicide note right before the shooting.”
Toler adds: “One last thing, noticed by @JakeGodin: the Allen shooter was a big fan of @libsoftiktok and signed off on one of his posts with ‘Heil Hitler.”
He concludes: “The Allen shooter was obviously a white supremacist / neo-Nazi. He was basically announcing that he was going to do a mass shooting for months beforehand, and planned his target weeks in advance.”
NCRM will not embed the images or link to them directly, but Toler’s Twitter account is here.