Maryland Mall Shooter: Tea Party Extremist? No — Teen Skateboarder

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Darion Marcus Aguilar, 19, has been named as the gunman who killed two people Saturday at the Columbia mall near Baltimore:

Why Darion Marcus Aguilar shot two people to death and then killed himself is still a mystery to police. They’re investigating who the 19-year-old man was and whether he even knew the people he shot Saturday.
“I know there’s a lot of interest in the motive for this, and I have as much interest in that as anybody,” Howard County Police Chief Bill McMahon told reporters Sunday.
He said there was still no known relationship between the shooter and his victims, though he did not rule out the possibility that there was one.
Police said that Aguilar showed up at The Mall in Columbia in a taxi and stayed in a “generally confined area” before going to Zumiez, a shop that caters to skaters, on the second floor.
There he fired six to nine shots, killing 21-year-old Brianna Benlolo and 25-year-old Tyler Johnson before turning the shotgun on himself.

The Daily Mail has more background:

Howard County detectives have seized a diary from the home of Aguilar which expressed unhappiness with his life.
The Prince George’s County Police Department said it received a missing persons report for Aguilar at about 1:40 p.m. Saturday, more than two hours after the mall shooting. Officers went to Aguilar’s home to speak with his mother about 5 p.m. and saw Aguilar’s journal. The portion the officer read made him concerned for Aguilar’s safety, the department said.
Police began tracking Aguilar’s phone and soon discovered it was at the mall.
Howard County Police Chief William McMahon said the journal expressed general unhappiness, but he did not give any specifics about the writings. . . .
His dumbfounded mother described him as ‘a gentle, sweet kid’ who has never been interested in guns. . . .
‘If you were to go in his room you would see what a gentle sweet kid he was,’ she said, adding that he was a vegetarian because he was concerned about animal welfare.
‘I don’t know what happened, I really don’t. It’s so unusual, you can talk to any of his friends and find out what a gentle person he was.
‘I don’t know, he’s never had a gun before, never been interested in guns or anything like that. I just don’t know what happened, I just don’t know what happened.’
The woman, who didn’t give her name, told reporters she didn’t believe her son knew his victims, contradicting earlier local radio reports that he had dated Benlolo. . . .
His friend, Ellis Cropper, told ABC News that Aguilar worked at a local Dunkin Donuts where he’d just got a promotion and was planning on enrolling in college.
‘Darion was a good kid,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happened … Darion is quiet, kept to himself. Nice, normal, calm demeanor.’ . . .
Aguilar graduated in 2013 from James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring, said Dana Tofig, a Montgomery County schools spokesman.
A person who attended the high school with Aguilar told The Associated Press that he was an avid skateboarder. . . .
Benlolo’s grandfather, John Feins, said in a telephone interview from Florida that his granddaughter had a two-year-old son and that the job at Zumiez was her first since she went back to work after her son’s birth.
‘She was all excited because she was the manager there,’ he said.
He said he had spoken with his daughter, Brianna’s mother, earlier in the day, but didn’t know who the gunman was or whether the person knew his granddaughter.
‘It’s senseless. It’s totally, totally senseless,’ he said.
He described his daughter’s family as a military family that had moved frequently and had been in Colorado before moving to Maryland about two years ago.

To summarize: This was a senseless crime committed by someone with no discernible political motive, but who was definitely not a right-wing Tea Party extremist, and therefore liberals will quickly forget it, except to use it as a statistic to advocate gun control, despite the fact that (a) Maryland has fairly strict laws that limit concealed carry, and (b) the shooter used a shotgun, the very weapon recommended by Vice President Joe Biden.

UPDATE: Pat Dollard noticed this quote buried wwaaayy down deep in a Washington Post article:

But the news did not entirely shock another Blake classmate, Aaron Gayadeen.
“He was always a little bit crazy,” Gayadeen said through Facebook messages. “To be honest I am a little in shock that it was him but I’m not too surprised. .?.?. He would always talk about what it would be like to stab someone but he would always gimme a weird look then laugh and say ‘just kidding.’?”
Gayadeen said Aguilar would make these remarks in jest during spare time in a pre-engineering class, an elective they took to graduate. “He would be like, ‘I wonder what it feels like to stab someone. A knife piercing thru someone’s skin.’?”

Professor Donald Douglas gets straight to the point:

Well, this doesn’t fit the far-right tea party Second Amendment profile.
A black dude with an Hispanic surname.

 

78 comments

  1. Right now, this is the very definition of “senseless”. God help the victim’s families and the gunman’s family, too.

  2. “…he was a vegetarian because he was concerned about animal welfare.”

    Sounds like another hate-filled lefty to me.

  3. Something doesn’t smell right to me.

    No mention of mental problems. So, we’re to believe that a mostly-normal guy just snaps one day FOR NO REASON and kills random people.

    It’s still early, so I’m not going to go all “conspiracy”…yet. But I’m getting the feeling we’re not being given all the relevant information.

  4. And who was in for twenty for inexplicable madness?
    Okay, he takes a taxi with a shotgun? He fires six to nine shots? You’d have to reload. Most shotguns hold no more than 5 rounds.
    We can surmise two things here. The shotgun was sawed off or nobody in Maryland is alarmed by someone entering a mall with a shotgun.

  5. “He was always a little bit crazy” Um that is the smoking gun. My predation we will find out that he was a VERY odd fellow for a long time. We as a society have lost the ability to spot the insane and get then the treatment they need

  6. skateboards destroy the individual’s respect for traffic laws, property rights and the 1st Amendment rights of other people to assemble in public and pass unmolested along the dstreets. Not to mention they’re a major source of persistent head trauma. Maryland should ban them; that would put an end to this sort of violence.

  8. He supposedly took it into the dressing room before he came out blasting. It would have looked odd bringing a shot gun into the dressing room. He assembled it in there.

    But normally they are real strict about bringing bags into the dressing room.

  12. “the shooter used a shotgun, the very weapon recommended by Vice President Joe Biden.”

    Who, by the way, is from that neck of the woods, isn’t he?

  14. You just don’t get it. Since Mr Aguilar had no (discernible) motive, it just proves that nobody can be trusted with firearms, not even those people with no previous criminal records nor contact with mental health professionals, and therefore we must ban firearms, period, for our own good. Please make a not of this.

  15. You mean the shooter wasn’t a conservative white male?
    David Sirota at Salon must be gnashing his teeth and flapping his wrists!

  16. It also looks to be a personal crime. I.e., the shooter knew the victims.

    Yes, some people were going to the profile (white, male, suburban, loner, etc.) and that is the case statistically but just as with the Beltway shooter, there are exceptions.

    There’s something I’m really curious about: Was he a pothead? A lot of these shootings are committed by teenaged boys with diagnosed (or in this case, observed) mental problems who were heavy pot users: Holmes, Cho, Loughner, Tsarnaev (though not technically a shooting).

  17. Hitler was a vegetarian and expressed the exact same sentiments about animal cruelty. I hate to go Godwin, but it’s true.

  19. Bourdain said it best: Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I’ll accommodate them, I’ll rummage around for something to feed them, for a ‘vegetarian plate’, if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.

  21. Wagers one of two:

    1. Schizophreniform breakdown.
    2. Humiliated by store employees some time in the recent past.

  22. I respect vegetarians who are Hindu but the problem with modern western vegetarians is that it’s just moral preening.

  23. There’s actually a facebook photo (from Benlolo’s profile) taken in what appears to be a skateboard shop that has a young man standing behined Benlolo who looks a good deal like the shooter, as in, COULD be him, but might not be. Maybe there was a possible minor acquaintance of the two based on that photo. http://i.imgur.com/r1W38zL.jpg

    None of the studio portraits of the shooter show his ears, this Flickr account of the shooter (same high school, same name, fireworks and rocks native to MD in the photostream) from 2012 does, though the young man is of course younger looking, and shown in semi-profile.) http://www.flickr.com/photos/88086148@N08/

    Edited to add an image, fix link

  31. Speaking as the guy who literally did write the book on the animal rights nutbars, it’s not just moral preening; it’s moral fraud. Vegans don’t follow any moral principle; they follow a stupid, mindless rule, “don’t put animal parts in your mouth.”

    They have no idea if their vegan diet causes more animal deaths, or fewer, or the same amount as mine, which relies heavily on wild game.

    What’s more, they don’t care. It’s a cheap, stupid pose that allows them to claim a condescending moral superiority without any real effort.

  32. Mulattoes? I do not want to start ringing the “R” bell, but that is a broad brush you are painting with there. Rather than suggesting this is caused by miscegenation, you might consider other more likely causes first.

  34. I would say I love eating at Longhorn and Golden Corral, but you would think I’m saying it just to annoy you.

  35. That’s why I prefaced my remarks with “right now”. There is more to this story, but no one may ever figure it out…

  36. If they do discover the truth, it is likely to be buried because it won’t fit the loony left’s narrative. I strongly suspect they will be trying real hard to drop this down the memory hole before anyone gets wind of the truth.

  37. Some models have an 8 round capacity; that, plus one in the chamber gives you 9.

    And Richard is correct about disassembling a shotgun. Even the 8+1 models will fit into a relatively small bag when broken down into 2 pieces.

    But that means pre-planning, which implies that the shooter did not do this on a whim.

  38. You place your trust in the delusions of political correctness at your own peril. Me – I prefer to call a spade a spade.

    Are you familiar with Philip Chism?

  40. What’s more, many older pump shotguns are takedown models, where the barrel/magazine comes off as a unit. The resulting halves stow easily in something like a tennis racquet case.

  43. Quiet mention…by one acquaintance, who says he would muse on homicidal themes, i.e., “what would it feel like” to stab someone.

  44. Th. Jefferson made the same observations I’ve made. Reference Query 14 of Notes on the State of Virginia.

    Was Jefferson wrong?

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