The Allen, Texas, Attack: Ideological Fuzziness and the Contemporary Nature of Far-Right Violence.

• Author: Mattheis, Ashley A.

On May 6, 2023, 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, a man with longstanding neo-Nazi views, murdered eight people and injured seven more in a mass shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets mall in Allen, Texas, a suburb approximately 20 miles north of Dallas. A policeman shot him dead at the scene before he could cause further bloodshed. It was the second mass shooting in Texas in little over a week (1) and the sixth in the state this year. (2) It is, at the time of publication, the second deadliest mass shooting in the United States in 2023. (3)

Mauricio Garcia dressed in black for the attack and wore body armor with numerous magazines attached to its chest rig. He had affixed a patch that read "RWDS"--an acronym for "Right Wing Death Squad" (a)--to his body armor alongside two "Punisher" motifs. (4) Although he was dressed in quasi-paramilitary garb, Garcia had little military experience. Aged 18 in June 2008, Garcia had entered basic training as an infantryman at Fort Benning but was expelled after three months due to concerns about his mental health. The Army discharged Garcia before he could receive rifle training, and so it is unclear whether prior military experience was a factor in the lethality of his attack. (5) Although Garcia had little military experience, his social media posts and diary entries indicate that he regularly visited firing ranges to practice discharging his weapon.

Garcia planned his killings for some time. He extensively researched his target, Allen Premium Outlets, and posted numerous photographs of the building and its parking lot on his Odnoklassniki (OK) (a Russian social media site that translates to "classmates") profile on April 16, 2023. These posts included screenshots of Google geo-location information--indicating he had previously visited the mall on May 14, 2022, January 7, 2023, and April 15, 2023--and another screenshot showing the mall's busiest times and an indoor map of the facility. (6) This approach was similar to that of the Buffalo, New York, shooter, who also conducted extensive research on his target (a supermarket frequented by Black patrons) prior to his attack and utilized Google's "popular time" feature to select the best time to carry out his attack. (7) The Allen, Texas, shooting is another example of a racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism incident taking place at a retail location, as opposed to a place of worship, for example. Large retail locations are becoming one of the preferred soft targets for those seeking to carry out a mass casualty attack. (b)

On the day of the attack, Garcia posted a short video of himself on YouTube wearing a "Scream" mask, which he then removed. "Not quite what you were expecting, huh?" he said on the video. (8) An ardent white supremacist, Garcia was also of Hispanic heritage. Twenty-four minutes before the shooting, Garcia reportedly emailed a rock singer links to his YouTube and OK profiles. (9) This deviates from other extreme right-wing mass shooters, who tend to post their propaganda content and manifestos on image boards (c) and mainstream social media sites. (10)

Unlike several recent right-wing violent extremists, Garcia did not livestream (d) his rampage. Dashcam footage from a bystander's vehicle that circulated online in the aftermath of the massacre showed Garcia exiting a vehicle in the parking lot of Allen Premium Outlets and immediately beginning to shoot at people on the sidewalk. (11) Garcia murdered eight people and injured seven more. At 3:36pm local time, an Allen police officer, who was at the mall on an unrelated call, "heard gunshots, went to the gunshots, engaged the suspect, and neutralized the suspect," according to the Allen Police Department. (12) After Garcia's death, police recovered "multiple weapons" at the scene, "including an AR-15-style rifle and a handgun." (13) One report recorded police recovering four firearms. (14)

Prior to the attack, the gunman had posted pictures to his OK profile of at least four different pistols, two assault rifles, and a pump-action shotgun with photographs of large amounts of ammunition and his chest rig (which, in one photo, contained 16 ammunition clips--indicative of a capacity for carnage he was ultimately unable to achieve). Garcia also posted online the electronic receipts for two 9mm pistols (a Beretta and a Sig Sauer) and a Kalashnikov USA KR-103, totaling $3,217.29. Garcia bought the firearms online in three separate transactions in June 2022. (15)

In the aftermath of the attack, eyewitnesses recalled truly horrifying scenes. (16) Garcia's victims included three children aged 11, eight, and three. (17) These numbers fail to convey the scale of multiple personal tragedies. Ilda Mendoza, who was critically injured during the shooting, lost her two daughters: Daniela, aged 11, and Sofia, aged eight. A six-year-old boy wounded in the massacre was orphaned. The gunman killed both the boy's parents, Cho Kyu Song and Kang Shin Young, and his three-year-old brother, James. The dead included Aishwarya Thatikonda, a 26-year-old Indian engineer who was visiting the mall with a friend; Elio Cumana-Rivas, a 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant who had arrived in Dallas less than a year ago seeking to escape violence in his own country; and Christian LaCour, a mall security guard, aged 20. (18)

Garcia's own death leaves many questions unanswered. Did he select his victims on ideological or racial grounds, or target them indiscriminately? Did he choose Allen as the site for the killings because of its racial diversity? With a population of about 105,000 residents, Allen is among Dallas-Fort Worth's most diverse areas. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Allen's population as of July 2022 was about 19.2% Asian, 9.6% Black and 11.2% Hispanic/Latino. (19)

This is not the first time that the city of Allen has featured in an extreme right-wing terrorist attack. In August 2019, Patrick Crusius, who lived in Allen, drove 650 miles from his home to El Paso, Texas, where he murdered 23 people at a shopping mall. (20) Crusius pled guilty to 90 federal charges earlier this year; a judge will sentence him at the end of June. (21) This latest attack is part of a broader trend that is contributing to a "heightened threat environment" nationally and internationally, notes a recent DHS National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) bulletin. (22)

This article examines the radicalization of Mauricio Garcia, making use of hundreds of pages of his handwritten diary, as well as his posts on the social media platform Odnoklassniki (often abbreviated as OK or OK.ru). These posts were manually collected by the authors from Garcia's OK profile. OK was founded in 2006 by Albert Popkov and has become one of the most popular platforms in Russia and the former Soviet Republics, after Vkontakte and Facebook. (23) The authors also take a close look at the roles of race, gender, and misogyny, which are interwoven into the shooter's discussion of grievance and foundational to his ideological identifications.

The Radicalization of Mauricio Garcia

Garcia left a sizable online footprint, though it appears to be a socially isolated one. A preliminary review by officials "found that the gunman's social media posts were not liked or shared by other users." (24) Though Garcia did not leave a manifesto--manifestos have become hallmarks of many violent right-wing extremist attacks (e)--he did keep a diary. This handwritten document dates from approximately 2013 onward, and Garcia appears to have individually scanned over 300 pages and uploaded them to his OK profile. His first post on OK is dated April 2, 2020. From this first post to the date of the attack, he presumably refrained from adding to his handwritten diary and only posted material to his online profile.

It is notoriously difficult to trace an individual's radicalization trajectory by reading only their social media posts, but Garcia's case has proven especially complex. His diary is, to put it mildly, all over the place. Garcia's diary contains over 300 pages and a mix of stories about arguments with his former bosses and coworkers, almost getting into fistfights of his own imagining...