White shooter kills 3 Black people in Florida hate crime as Washington celebrates King’s dream

(AP) — A masked white man carrying at least one weapon bearing a swastika fatally shot three Black people inside a Florida store Saturday in an attack with a clear motive of racial hatred, officials said.

The shooting in a Dollar General store in a predominantly, neighbourhood left two men and one woman dead and was “racially motivated,” Jacksonville Sheriff TK Waters said.

In addition to carrying a firearm with a painted symbol of the genocidal Nazi regime of Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, the shooter issued racist statements before the shooting. He killed himself at the scene.

“He hated Black people,” the sheriff said.

The shooting came on the same day thousands visited Washington, DC to attend the Reverend Al Sharpton’s 60th anniversary commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” speech.

Rudolph McKissick, a national board member of Sharpton’s National Action Network, was not in Washington, DC on Saturday. Yet his thoughts on the shooting touched on issues raised by the civil rights leader.

“The irony is on the day we celebrate the 60th commemoration of the March on Washington, where Dr Martin Luther King stood up and talked about a dream for racial equality and for love, we still yet live in a country where that dream is not a reality,” McKissick said. “That dream has now been replaced by bigotry.”

The gunman, who was in his 20s, wore a bullet-resistant vest and used a Glock handgun and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. He acted alone and there was no evidence he was part of a group, Waters said.

The shooter sent written statements to federal law enforcement and at least one media outlet shortly before the attack with evidence suggesting the attack was intended to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of two people during a video game tournament in Jacksonville by a shooter who also killed himself.

Officials did not immediately release the names of the victims or the gunman on Saturday. Local media identified a man believed to be the shooter but his identity was not independently confirmed by the Associated Press by early Sunday.

The shooting happened just before 2 pm within a mile of Edward Waters University, a small, historically Black university.

The university said in a statement that a security officer had seen the man near the school’s library and asked for identification. When he refused, he was asked to leave and returned to his car. He was spotted putting on the bullet-resistant vest and a mask before leaving the grounds, although it was not known whether he had planned an attack at the university, Waters said.

“I can’t tell you what his mindset was while he was there, but he did go there,” the sheriff said.

Shortly before the attack, the gunman sent his father a text message telling him to check his computer, where he found his writings. The family notified 911, but the shooting had already begun, Waters said.

“This is a dark day in Jacksonville’s history. There is no place for hate in this community,” said Waters, who noted the FBI was assisting with the ongoing inquiry and had opened a hate crime investigation. “I am sickened by this cowardly shooter’s personal ideology.”

Mayor Donna Deegan said she was heartbroken. “This is a community that has suffered again and again. So many times this is where we end up,” Deegan said. “This is something that should not and must not continue to happen in our community.”