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Hate is now being debated as a possible motive behind why Santino Legan opened fire Sunday in a mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, killing three people and injuring 12 others.
Questions have swirled about whether Legan was swayed or fueled by extremist sympathies. An Instagram post he put up shortly before the shooting promoted a white supremacist manifesto written in 1890 and displayed racial and misogynistic slurs to describe “hordes” of Silicon Valley workers and people of mixed-race origin “overcrowding” towns. The 1890 text is described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “celebrated” across the radical right because of its advocacy for social Darwinism along racial lines.
Authorities have said that they have not yet determined whether Legan was motivated by any extremist ideologies. On Wednesday, the Bay Area’s top FBI agent refuted news reports that white supremacist and radical Islamic reading materials had been found at the shooter’s Nevada apartment.
“We’re looking at multiple threads of conversation that he’s had,” FBI special agent-in-charge Jack Bennett said at a brief impromptu news conference. “There is no ideology we’re calling right now.”
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