Gunman In Yoga Attack Studio had a criminal history, racist and sexist videos published: NPR

Updated at 15:22 ET

Further information is revealed on the criminal and online history of the man who killed two people, wounded five others, and then was killed in a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida on Friday. evening. He had been charged with battery twice and many media reported evidence of his misogynistic and racist beliefs.

In a press release issued Saturday, Tallahassee police identified the assailant, who had shot six people with the aid of a handgun and who had whipped a seventh person during the attack, Scott Beierle, 40 years old. He was a resident of Deltona, Florida, and a graduate of Florida State University.

Tallahassee police said the investigators were still trying to link Beierle to his victims. Saturday's press release indicated that the Volusia County Sherriff Office had executed a search warrant at the Beierle Residence. The police also obtained several search warrants on their electronic devices and their social network profiles.

A search in the court records of Leon County, Florida, indicates that a man named Scott Paul Beierle, born in 1978, was the defendant in two detention cases – one in 2012 and one in 2016 – and the defendant in an intrusion case in 2014. According to the Associated Press, Scott Beierle, the assailant at the Friday shooting, was charged with battery by the police in 2012 to be seized women's buttocks in a refectory on the Florida State University campus. The AP also reported that Beierle had been banned from the FSU campus in 2014.

Official reports on the incidents reported to NPR by the Tallahassee Police Department indicate that in 2016, a woman reportedly told the police that Beierle had been slapped and caught buttock without her consent in a swimming pool. a complex of apartments. The report shows that his account was corroborated by video evidence and that Beierle was charged with "Battery Touch or Strike".

According to the AP, both batteries were finally dropped. The 2016 charges were dropped after Beierle had a prosecution suit, which grants an amnesty to an accused in exchange for meeting certain requirements. And a woman, Courtnee Connon, who told the Tallahassee Democrat Beierle grabbed her buttocks in her refectory at the FSU in 2012, said she had spoken to the police but had finally decided not to sue Beierle. Connon, who was 18 at the time of the incident, told the democrat she was frightened by the idea of ​​going to court, and uncertain criminal charges deterred Beierle from attacking women in the future.

On Saturday, Buzzfeed News reported that Beierle had uploaded a series of racist and misogynistic videos to YouTube in 2014 and that he had also posted songs on SoundCloud in the last few months. According to Buzzfeed News, a song released just before Friday's shooting included the lyrics: "To hell with the boss who does not want to let go / To hell with the girl, I can not stand at the door." In addition, one of Beierle's videos on YouTube would have expressed sympathy to Elliot Rodger, who had launched a misogynist murder in Isla Vista, California, in 2014.

All original Beierle videos have been removed from YouTube after Buzzfeed News published its story, but a video posted on YouTube Saturday appears to be a copy of one of Beierle's original videos. A man whose portrait corresponds to the Beierle photo published by the Tallahassee Police Department uses a racial insult to describe blacks and then enumerates the reasons for which he despises them. It includes a section in which he described black women as "ugly and disgusting".

The AP also reported that a "man who looks like Beierle" appeared in a series of videos posted on YouTube in 2014, and that he called women coming out with "whores, black men, "spoke of an" invasion "of Central America. and bitch on women.

Buzzfeed News and The New York Times reports in his videos, Beierle described moments when women rejected his romantic advances. Both agencies report that when he described a woman who, he said, did not show up on the scheduled dates, he stated that he "could have torn off his head."

The Tallahassee Police Department has not yet released any information on any alleged motive of Friday's attack. But officer Damon Miller, Jr., a spokesman for the Tallahassee Police Department, told NPR by telephone that the department was focusing on the question of why the shooter had chosen to attack the company. Company that he had attacked, Hot Yoga Tallahassee. "It's a little off the beaten track," Miller says. "If you did not know it was there, you would not know it [about the studio]. "

According to Miller, the survey covers all of Beierle's social media accounts, although he was unable to confirm which accounts the investigators were specifically examining. Since the shooter has been killed, Miller says, "We can only trust what has been left behind us".

Miller could not confirm misogyny as the motive for this attack. But the focus put online by Beierle on the romantic rejection – and his reference to Elliot Rodger – is reminiscent of the group of men on the internet who call themselves "incels", which is the only thing I can say. abbreviation for "unintentional single".

The Gimlet podcast Reply to all pointed out that the term "unintentional single" was coined by a homosexual Canadian woman who had created an online support group to help people with similar hardship as she had known. Others eventually co-opted the term, which took on a totally different meaning than the one his original creator had wanted.

In April, a man from the Incel community planted his van on a sidewalk in Toronto and killed 10 people. In the aftermath of this attack, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, of NPR, spoke with Arshy Mann, a Toronto-based journalist who describes the incarcerations and defines them as "an online subculture of young men who feel very frustrated about their sexual and romantic lives ".

Mann said he "is turning to a very virulent misogyny, and they spend a lot of time engaging in very violent ideas about the horrible things they want to do to sexually prosperous women and men."

Mann told Garcia-Navarro of NPR that the badges tend to venerate personalities like Elliot Rodger. Mann added that misogyny "incel" was often linked to racial panic: even though men of all ethnicities were involved in the incel community, "at least for many of them, these more misogynistic movements can often be a point of entry into the most racialized or anti-Semitic branches of the alt-right. "

This year, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes and hate groups, has added "male supremacy" to the list of ideologies that it inscribes on its "hate card".