Halifax shooting plot: inside the social media world of foiled 'Columbiners'

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/16/foiled-halifax-mall-shooting-tumblr-columbiners

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When Cara-Jade Lynch got close to Randall Shepherd on Tumblr, she felt she knew him better than almost anyone in his real life.

On his public page, Shepherd posted images of porn, guns, mass murderers and naked women covered in blood which Lynch, 19, would like or reblog from her home in the UK.

In private messages, he began to tell her about how glad he was to have moved away from his family in Nova Scotia, Canada. His best friend, James Gamble, was also on Tumblr. Lynch learned about his “really bad” depression.

“I think people on Tumblr just understand these things more,” she said. “You feel like you can be yourself there without any judgment.”

Related: Canadian man and American woman charged over foiled mass shooting plot

But Lynch and others who considered Gamble and Shepherd to be close friends say they didn’t realize their shared “true crime” fantasy world meant something different to the two men. On Friday, police in Gamble and Shepherd’s hometown, Halifax, announced they had thwarted a plot to open fire in a local mall and had arrested Shepherd, 20, on charges of conspiracy to commit murder.

Lindsay Souvannarath, a 23-year-old from Illinois, was arrested as she arrived at the Halifax airport. Gamble died hours earlier, shooting himself after police surrounded his home.

Police almost never intercept mass shooting attacks. This time, they acted on an anonymous tip. In that and every other way, the Halifax plot bucked patterns. Mass shootings are extremely rare in Canada. In 78 US public gun attacks over 30 years, only one involved a female killer. Only three had more than one shooter. Just 10 involved teenagers.

Lynch agrees that Halifax came close to a tragedy. She had messaged often with Shepherd in the weeks before Valentine’s Day, for which police said the shooting was planned. Shepherd was known to be extremely shy, but suddenly he sent Lynch a message saying how much he liked her.

“I think two weeks ago, he mentioned to me that he wouldn’t be around much longer, and I thought that was a bit weird, so I was like, ‘Oh, how come?’” she said. “And he was just like, ‘Oh because I won’t.’”

On Thursday, he said he wished he could see her in the next two days.

“I feel kind of stupid for not realizing sooner that something was going to happen,” Lynch said. “Why couldn’t I see it?”

Plotters self-identified as ‘Columbiners’

The 1999 Columbine High School shooting, in which 13 people were killed, involved two young gunmen, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. It happened when Shepherd and Gamble were in preschool, but they and Souvannarath appear to have been among thousands to dissect it online, posting footage alongside clips of horror movies, genocide and war. They often identified themselves as “Columbiners”.

It was in that context that Gamble and Souvannarath posted an ad on Tumblr for an upcoming massacre in Halifax, showing them in horror masks under the words “der untergang”, or “the downfall” – also the name of a German film about Hitler’s last days.

“Valentine’s Day – It’s Going Down,” read the tagline, followed by their Tumblr usernames: cockswastika and shallow-existences.

The document was “edited like crazy” and at one point the event date changed from early February to Valentine’s Day, said Lynch. It was liked and reblogged by dozens of people at the time.

Lynch said growing up watching CSI and horror movies turned into a fascination, a sort of admiration, with murderers and how their minds work. “But I don’t think any of us knew that someone would actually carry things out like that,” she said.

People who knew Gamble and Shepherd say their online personas were not apparent in person. The two were friends from high school and often went to see bands together. Facebook pages in their names say they worked at Walmart; Shepherd was most recently working at a call center, where he befriended co-workers.

A friend of Gamble’s said he spent the day before his death at a children’s science center with her. But he was also deeply depressed.

“He was very chill and fun-loving, he went to a lot of local music venues and was just all around a very nice guy,” said the 16-year-old, whom the Guardian is not naming and who met Gamble at a show and said she stayed up every night talking to him.

“In his last few months he could barely sleep or eat and it was killing him. I knew he was going to kill himself eventually but I didn’t expect it to be soon.”

Souvannarath graduated from small Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 2014 with a double major in English and creative writing, according to the college. Facebook profiles of a Souvannarath family in Illinois show a tight-knit family from Laos.

On social media accounts associated with a Lindsay Souvannarath, she appeared to be interested in Nazi imagery and gore.

It’s unclear if Souvannarath had been to Halifax before. Gamble and Shepherd’s friends are not sure how the three met. Shepherd and Souvannarath had been on a gaming website at the same time, but the 16-year-old believes they crossed paths on Tumblr.

Gamble sometimes posted jointly with her, but they kept their friendship “more private from everyone else”, said Lynch. “Both of them had Twitter, and both of them may have used Twitter to speak more ... And apparently they used these online chat forums to speak.”

A foiled attack

Police were tipped off about the planned attack on Thursday morning, they said. The information came in to the CrimeStoppers line, where anonymity is guaranteed. By that night, police said, they had tracked a suspect to a suburban home: James Gamble.

Gamble was talking to the 16-year-old that night, she said. On Tumblr, she wrote that at 9.01pm he suddenly said goodbye. Police later said Gamble told them he had no guns, but shot himself while they were outside. At 1.20am, they entered the house and found his body, along with three long-barrel shotguns.

Gamble often posted pictures of himself with what appears to be a standard five-round Savage 99 shotgun, as well as a hunting knife.

Buying guns in Canada takes weeks, a police background check and two personal references – though if the applicant has no criminal record, police are likely to approve the ownership. Police did not immediately comment on whether anybody in the house was licensed to buy firearms.

Less than an hour after police discovered Gamble’s body, they arrested Souvannarath and Shepherd at the airport, where he was picking her up. She confessed to the plot, police said, and said she had prescheduled several messages to be posted on Twitter after her death. In the morning, Canadian authorities contacted police in tiny Geneva, Illinois, and asked them to put together a search warrant for her house, said Geneva police commander Julie Nash.

A fourth person, a 17-year-old boy from a Halifax suburb, was arrested and released the next day when police said they had no evidence to tie him to the plot. His father declined comment for this piece.

That night, police brought Gamble’s 16-year-old friend in for questioning. She said she knew nothing about the plot, and they asked her to sign over her Facebook account so they could read messages between her, Gamble and Shepherd, she said.

In the UK, Lynch woke at 7am to find a message from Shepherd from about 2am Halifax time – right when he was arrested. He mentioned nothing about Gamble’s death, the airport or a shooting.

Looking back, she believes the suspects were motivated by a very particular kind of fame. They had a passing interest in mass shootings and serial killers but Columbine meant something different, because they still rehashed its memory.

“I don’t think it was aimed at people [in Halifax] specifically,” Lynch said.

“Obviously people still talk about [the Columbine shooters] to this day, and I think they just wanted a sense of that,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh my gosh, you know, if I go out and do this then, you know, people will still be talking about me in, like, 20 years to come.”