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.

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.

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.

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.