FBI: Garlic Festival Gunman Was 'Kind of a Loner'

Police now believe Legan acted alone
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Jul 31, 2019 3:45 AM CDT
Police: Garlic Festival Gunman Probably Acted Alone
This screenshot of Santino William Legan's Instagram account shows a selfie of Legan, who opened fire with an "assault-type rifle" on Sunday, July 28, 2019, at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, Calif., killing two children and another man.   (Instagram via AP)

After days of searching for evidence of a second suspect, police now believe that the gunman who killed three people and wounded a dozen others at the Gilroy Garlic Festival on Sunday acted alone. Santino William Legan "was not with anybody else. That is sort of supporting the thought now that he acted on his own," Gilroy Chief Scot Smithee said Tuesday. "Our investigation is leading us more and more to believe that there was not a second subject involved." Investigators trying to determine a motive for the mass shooting have found an unused shotgun in the car he drove to the California festival, the San Jose Mercury News reports. At an apartment in Walker Lake, Nevada, which was Legan's most recent listed address, police have found items including a bulletproof vest, a gas mask, gun pamphlets, and what authorities describe as a "letter from Virginia to Santino."

A property manager in Walker Lake tells CNN that Legan paid a month's rent on a unit there in April, but moved out in the middle of the night a few days later. It's not clear when the teenager, who went to high school in Gilroy, returned to California. He legally bought both the shotgun and the AK-47-style rifle used in the attack. Authorities are now analyzing Legan's social media posts. On the day of the shooting, Legan posted on Instagram, mocking the garlic festival and complaining about "hordes" of mestizos and white people from Silicon Valley moving to that area of northern California. He also urged followers to read a white supremacist book. On his account, he said he is Italian and Iranian. "We understand him to be kind of a loner," Craig Fair, deputy special agent in charge of the FBI's San Francisco Division, tells the AP. "People who act alone are exceptionally dangerous because they ... may not communicate their plans, intentions, mindset." (Police say Legan killed a 6-year-old boy, a 25-year-old man, and a 13-year-old girl who may have inadvertently saved a relative.)

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