A white man driven by racial hatred shot dead three black people in a discount store in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday before taking his own life after a standoff with police, authorities said.
“He targeted a certain group of people and that’s black people,” Jacksonville Sheriff TK Waters told a news conference about the gunman, who was in his early 20s. “That’s what he said he wanted to kill. And that’s very clear.”
The shooter, who has not yet been identified, entered a Dollar General store wearing a tactical vest, armed with an AR-style rifle and a handgun, the sheriff’s office said.
Manifestos discovered by the gunman’s family shortly before the attack “detail the shooter’s disgusting ideology of hate,” Waters said, adding that at least one of the guns had hand-drawn swastikas on it.
The shooting took place near Edward Waters University, a historically black college in the southern US state.
The university said in a statement that the shooter had been on campus earlier that day, though no one was harmed.
“An on-campus Edward Waters University security officer engaged an unidentified male in the vicinity of the Centennial Library on campus,” it said. “The individual refused to identify themselves and was asked to leave.”
The university added that the individual — later identified as the shooter — left “without incident.”
The FBI would investigate the shooting as a hate crime, said Sherri Onks, the bureau’s special agent for Jacksonville, a city of nearly 1 million in the northeast corner of the state.
There was no evidence that the shooter was part of a larger group, officials said.
“We know that he acted completely alone,” Waters said.
Mass shootings have become disturbingly common across the US, with easy access to firearms in most states and more guns in the country than citizens.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decried the “horrific” shooting and called the gunman a “scumbag.”
“He was targeting people based on their race, that is totally unacceptable,” said DeSantis, who is vying to be the Republican Party’s presidential candidate for next years election. “This guy killed himself rather than face the music and accept responsibility for his actions and so he took the coward’s way out.”
The deadly incident in Jacksonville is the latest in a series of racially motivated shooting sprees in the country.
The shooting was part of a weekend spate of gun violence in the US.
Earlier on Saturday, at least seven people were hospitalized after a shooting at a Caribbean festival in Boston, police said.
Meanwhile, two women were shot at a baseball game in Chicago the night before. That same night, a 16-year-old was shot dead and four others hurt after an argument erupted at a high school football game in Oklahoma, police said.
US President Joe Biden was briefed on the incident in Jacksonville, the White House said, and had received updates on other shootings over the past 24 hours across the country.
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