The 21-year-old who killed 17-year-olds Casey Jordan Marquez and Francisco Fernandez when he opened fire at Aztec High School in New Mexico has been identified as William Atchison. CNN reports that Atchison had been previously investigated by the FBI in March 2016 after troubling comments he made online came to their attention. According to the FBI, Atchison wrote something about what kind of cheap weapon one might want if they were going to carry out a school shooting.
Atchison went to a second-floor bathroom, where he was "preparing to confront students." Classes were in session at the time. Kassetas said Francisco Fernandez entered the bathroom where Atchison was gearing up. The police chief said Atchison immediately fired his gun, fatally wounding the teen.
Atchison then walked out to the hallway and encountered Casey Jordan Marquez, and he "immediately shot her dead," Kassetas said.
Unable to get into a barricaded classroom, Atchison seems to have shot himself shortly after, ending the bloodshed. The
Daily Beast adds that Atchison had no other run-ins with the law, which is why he wasn’t on law enforcement’s “radar.” Of course, online he was a real white supremacist piece of shit.
Despite local law enforcement’s claims that he wasn’t a known threat, and a visit from the FBI in 2016, Atchison spent most of the last half-decade glorifying school shooters on alt-right websites and posting plaintive appeals for help in fixing his life, according to hundreds of posts analyzed by The Daily Beast.
And while the Daily Beast says that most of Atchison’s early racism was in the form of provocative trolling, in recent months he appears to have evolved his world view into that of a real Trump-leaning, right-wing, white supremacist piece of shit.
In November, Atchison wrote on Steam, “How am I supposed to function in this world? Wherever I go, I see degeneracy. Pointless materialism, hedonism, sexual decay, dirty n**gers who do nothing but slowly break down this society etc. it’s fucking everywhere. No way to escape it, 99% of people are part of it and whatever I do I am confronted with the death of the West. Go to the store and buy groceries in peace? Nope, here’s a group of LGBT liberal filth in line with you. And there’s a n**ger family with 10 kids over there. And a Finn too, but he’s overweight as fuck and he’s buying alcohol and shit junk food. Fucking fantastic.
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On YouTube, Atchison admitted he posted anonymously on pro-Trump, white-supremacist sites like 4chan’s /pol/ board or The Daily Stormer, but gave up when domain registrars kept shutting down The Daily Stormer’s domain names. He, along with most of The Daily Stormer’s community, said the sites were “shoa’d,” an anti-Semitic slur.