This story is developing.
Per CBS, the gunman who police say opened fire at a California festival, killing three and injuring 15 others, has been identified as 19-year-old Santino William Legan, CBS News has learned. Witnesses say the gunman had a “high-powered rifle” and was shooting randomly into the crowd at the annual Garlic Festival in Gilroy Sunday evening. Some witnesses said he suddenly appeared from behind a stage before beginning to shoot. He was quickly shot and killed by Gilroy police.
Police at the scene found a backpack belonging to Legan that contained rifle ammunition, CBS News has learned. Gilroy chief of police Scot Smithee confirmed the gunman opened fire with some type of rifle.
#UPDATE Sources have confirmed that the suspect in the #GilroyGarlicShooting has been identified as Santino William Legan. @KatieKPIX has an update from the #LiveNewsDesk
Details: https://t.co/cPJXHux8KI pic.twitter.com/KJPZGA5vNq— KPIX 5 (@KPIXtv) July 29, 2019
California investigators name 19-year-old Santino William Legan as the suspect in the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting that killed 3 people and injured 15 others pic.twitter.com/lv1C9AzSmS
— Bloomberg TicToc (@tictoc) July 29, 2019
One of the photos on Legan’s instagram showed Ali Asghar Vahabzadeh, Legan’s maternal grandfather.
From Heavy
Legan, Who Identifies as Being of Italian & Iranian Descent, Posted on Instagram Before the Shooting. The Account Was Removed, but Heavy Obtained Screenshots
Santino Legan had an Instagram page with just three posts, including one post made days before the shooting and two posted on Sunday. The one most disturbing appears to have been posted shortly before the shooting.
“Ayyy garlic festival time. Come get wasted on overpriced shit.”
Legan also posted about a fringe white supremacist book written in 1890. Noted indivualist anarchist, revisionist historian and Holocaust denier James J. Martinc alled, the book, “…one of the most incendiary works ever to be published anywhere.” Legan quoted from the book in a post accompanied by a Smokey the Bear sign about fire danger. He wrote: “Read Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white twats?”
According to the book Modern Satanism: Anatomy of a Subculture, Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard was authored under a pseudonym. It is purported to expand on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “theories of master–slave morality and herd mentality …”
The book is described as being akin to Social Darwinism and includes misogynistic and racist principles “claiming that the woman and the family as a whole is the property of the man and proclaiming the innate superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race. The book also contains many strong anti-Semitic statements.”
By Kambree Nelson
