Washington Mall Shooter Found Dead

The Turkish immigrant who murdered five people in a Macy’s store inside Cascade Mall in Burlington, Washington last year has taken the coward’s way out.

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A 20-year-old man accused of fatally shooting five people at a Macy’s store in a Washington state mall last year was found dead in a jail cell, authorities said.

Jail personnel found A__ C__* unresponsive Sunday evening and began multiple lifesaving measures, including CPR, but were unable to revive him, according to a news release from the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.

He is believed to hanged himself, Skagit County prosecutors told the Seattle Times. The death remains under investigation.

The inmate “did not let justice take its course,” Skagit County Prosecuting Attorney Rich Weyrich told the Skagit Valley Herald. “Some may have a great relief that it’s over; some may feel cheated.”

C__ was accused of shooting a teenage girl, a man and three women with a rifle on Sept. 23 at a Macy’s makeup counter in the Cascade Mall in Burlington, Wash., 65 miles north of Seattle. Detectives said surveillance video showed it only took C__ about a minute to shoot all five victims. After the shooting, documents said, he left his Ruger rifle with a 25-round magazine on top of a cosmetics counter, then fled the mall in a car. C__ confessed to the shooting to detectives but did not explain why he did it.

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At the time he was arrested some speculated that because of his heritage this was a Muslim terror attack, but as we noted at the time of his arrest:

Because the suspected shooter, like the Orlando nightclub shooter, is a immigrant from a predominantly Muslim country, there is an immediate rush to label this a terrorist attack.

As a general rule of thumb, however, Muslim terrorists don’t have a track record of stopping on their own and then leaving the scene of a random mass murder attack. Their goal is typically to murder and terrorize as many people as possible before being martyred in a battle with authorities.

Nor is there any evidence that the murderer is practicing Muslim. I know several people from predominately Muslim countries who left because they aren’t Muslims and don’t like Islam. One of them is a deer-hunting, beer-drinking Iranian redneck. He’s not any more likely to go on a killing spree than you or I.

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The murderer was involuntarily committed to a mental health facility in 2015 and had a history of sexual assaults. He was a prohibited person, and could not legally own firearms.

He had attempted to buy a .45 ACP pistol before the shooting, but the gun store owner turned him down.

The attack was instead carried out with a common Ruger 10/22 chambered in .22 LR.

 

* Bearing Arms does not publish the names of mass or spree killers.

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