A recurring symbol in Garcia’s writings
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On the afternoon of May 6, 2023, a gunman opened fire in a mall parking lot in the Dallas suburb of Allen, Texas. The shooter killed eight people and wounded seven more before a police officer shot and killed him.
Authorities later identified the gunman as 33-year-old Mauricio Martinez Garcia. Unlike some other recent perpetrators of mass shootings, Garcia composed no manifesto or document explaining the reason for his violent spree. However, he did leave behind voluminous writings, in the form of handwritten and illustrated diary entries uploaded to a Russian social media site, where Garcia continued to post right up to the day of the shooting.
Overall, Garcia’s writings and on-line postings depict a troubled—and quite possibly experiencing mental illness—misogynistic loner who had few meaningful connections with others, especially women, and whose racism, particularly towards people of Asian and Muslim/Middle Eastern backgrounds, led him on a self-radicalizing path towards white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideas.
Several of Garcia’s victims in the mall shooting were of Asian background, but witnesses reported his shooting seemed indiscriminate. His writings, voluminous and disturbing as they are, do not provide clear indication that he undertook his shooting rampage for ideological reasons, whether of a white supremacist, incel, or other nature. His personal demons alone might have driven him to the crime.
Garcia’s writings, the earliest of which are from 2014, focused primarily on interactions with other people or incidents in his daily life, from eating at restaurants to going to metal concerts and adult entertainment venues to working at shipping and security companies. Many of his diary entries describe in detail his interactions with women he encountered, from fast food workers to nurses at hospitals, including his apparent attempts to flirt with them.
Garcia gives indications of not being a reliable narrator, such as repeatedly suggesting he ran his hand down the arm of a woman or that a woman ran her hand down his own arm. His writings give no indication of any meaningful relationships with women. He also often quotes the writings of others, frequently without attribution, which can sometimes be mistaken as his own words. This includes using terms specific to the incel community.
The gunman’s diaries also display a preoccupation with mental health. Garcia repeatedly notes people have called him a psychopath or suggested he might become a shooter. He adopted “10/6” as a symbol for himself, using it frequently in his diaries and getting it as a tattoo; “10/6” is a reference to the price tag on the hat worn by the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. In one online posting, Garcia referred to having been “5-17ed” from the Army, a reference to a type of discharge for “other designated physical or mental conditions.”
He also recorded occasional violent dreams and drew an illustration of himself as a chainsaw-wielding rabbit who killed two women because they treated him poorly in the past. In another entry, he admitted he intentionally cut himself when he was younger and drew an illustration of a bloody razor blade next to his rabbit alter ego wielding a bloody axe.
On the day of the shooting, Garcia posted a series of lyrics and quotes that included films and television series, such as Joker and Dahmer, about violent people with mental illness, as well as various quotes about violence and death.
Garcia’s writings show a clear preoccupation with racist, white supremacist and Nazi themes. The illustrations Garcia drew in his diaries include many neo-Nazi symbols, including the swastika, SS bolts, the Othala rune, the Wolfsangel, the insignia of the 28th “Wallonien” Waffen SS division, 14/88, and WPWW. In some of the diary entries he used a lightning bolt in place of the letter “s.” Garcia also purchased racist materials, such as “It’s okay to be white” and “white lives matter” t-shirts, and a patch reading RWDS (for “right wing death squad”) in the shape of a Waffen SS divisional insignia. Based on photographs, he also had large swastika and SS bolt tattoos.
Garcia frequently expressed virulent racism, primarily against Muslims and Asians, repeatedly using vile racist references, such as “camel jockey,” “slope,” “sand monkey,” “curry eating bitch,” and “fucking alien gook fish head cat eating pieces of shit,” among many others. In one entry, Garcia was pleased that a Lyft driver he hailed “was a cool white girl & not some disgusting foreigner.” Garcia also used phrases and imagery, such as “Deus Vult” and Crusader crosses, that are commonly used as anti-Muslim symbols. One t-shirt Garcia purchased and wore featured a Crusader and the phrase “I will see your Jihad and raise you a Crusade.” Garcia even got a “Deus Vult” tattoo to match his neo-Nazi tattoos.
In one diary entry, titled “I’m sorry,” Garcia noted that in the past he’d said he “would never show kindness to terrorists [a term he used for Muslims or people from the Middle East],” but then suggested, “since then I’ve had some good encounters w/middle eastern people.” After describing one alleged encounter, he wrote, “since Arabs, Indians & Muslims are giving me a chance, I’m going to give them a chance.” However, he filled the next page with a large “PSYCH” and a drawing of a Crusader cross and the Latin phrase “in hoc signo vinces” (or “with this sign you shall conquer”), and the page after that with a large “Deus Vult” and the words “Eat my holy shit & die” and “Mooselimb mutants,” the latter a frequent epithet he used for Muslims.
Garcia himself was not white but Latino, something that occasionally bothered him. He wrote that there “was a time when I was ashamed of being Hispanic.” However, he added, “I’m Hispanic whether I like or not. I’ve made peace with that.” In another incident, Garcia claimed someone asked, “Are you Hispanic?”, to which Garcia allegedly replied “Yuck, don’t remind me.” Garcia did not usually express hatred towards other Latinos the way he did people of Middle Eastern or Asian backgrounds, but once referred to someone as a “refried piece of shit” and in another entry wrote about “A world without YT [whitey],” in which he suggested that if “YT goes quietly," the “Hispanics are not coming just for the southwest [but] for the whole enchilada.” If “other non Hispanic minorities thought it was bad under YT,” he claimed, “wait til the Hispanics take over.” After listing several other negative consequences, Garcia asserted that “some of these losers believe in that white supremacy boogie man so blindly that they are going to blame YT long after he’s gone.” He went on to predict most of the world being taken over by the Chinese and “Africans & middle eastern savages.”
In early 2022, Garcia posted to his social media account a set of images he had found of Latin American neo-Nazis. In another posting, he shared a meme depicting “Latino children” at a crossroads where they could turn to the left towards “act black” or to the right towards “become white supremacist.”
Garcia did not often express his opinions about Black people, but in an early entry called President Barack Obama the “porch monkey in chief.” He shared blatantly antisemitic content on his social media account, but rarely mentioned Jews in his earlier, written writings. Garcia also pasted quotations from incel discussion forums on his social media account, something that he had not done in earlier written diary entries, suggesting that his difficulties with women may have drawn him towards a more incel-oriented and misogynistic ideology. In one post, he quotes Andrew Anglin, the founder of neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, writing, “Women deserve to be beaten and raped, NOT treated like they are humans, because they are NOT humans. AA.”
In both his written diaries and on his social media account, Garcia often quoted from or listed things he had read, including Anglin, who frequently appeared on such lists; in one diary entry, Garcia even drew the masthead for the Daily Stormer site. Other influences that appear on Garcia’s lists or postings include the antisemitic Unz Review, the racist cartoon Stonetoss, and the anti-immigrant website VDARE, among others.