(Ken Silva, Headline USA) The gunman who allegedly killed two hostages and a Texas SWAT officer last Saturday had previously been investigated by the FBI and placed on its terrorism watch list, according to The Daily Mail.
Citing unnamed law enforcement sources, The Daily Mail reported Wednesday that the FBI investigated members of the shooter’s family before Saturday’s killings.
The dead reportedly included SWAT officer Jorge Pastore, as well as mother Eman Ahmed El Nemr-Nassar and her two sons, Ahmed Mohamed Nassar, 35, and Riad Mohamed Nassar, 32. It’s reportedly still not clear which of the sons was the shooter.
According to reports, a woman ‘screaming for help’ called 911 in Austin at 2:49 a.m. on Saturday to say she had been stabbed and two other people were still trapped in the home.
“As Pastore and other SWAT members made entry, they were also met with heavy gunfire,” The Daily Mail reported.
“Pastore, 38, was killed and a second officer was wounded. Police fired back, killing the gunman. The bodies of two other victims and the suspect were found inside.”
While it appears to be a domestic incident rather than a planned act of terrorism, Saturday’s deadly event nevertheless marks the latest shooting involving a suspect that was already being monitored by the FBI.
An anonymous internet researcher who posts under the handle “Boltzmann Booty” has determined that the nation’s premiere law enforcement agency has monitored, but failed to stop, mass shooters before they go on their sprees at least 22 times.
Prominent examples of mass shooters who were on the FBI’s “radar” include Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza, Orlando Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen and Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz.
In Lanza’s case, FBI agents had reportedly previously questioned him for hacking computers.
With Orlando shooter Mateen, the FBI reportedly went as far as investigating him in direct relation to possibly being a terrorist threat—twice. “But the F.B.I. soon ended its examination of Mr. Mateen after finding no evidence that he posed a terrorist threat to his community,” the New York Times reported in June 2016.
In his research, Booty noted another anomaly with Mateen: His father was an FBI informant for more than a decade, as was reported by NPR in March 2018.
Then, there’s Parkland. Booty’s research linked to a 2018 New York Times report that “The F.B.I. received a tip last month from someone close to Nikolas Cruz that he owned a gun and had talked of committing a school shooting, the bureau revealed Friday, but it acknowledged that it had failed to investigate.”
Additionally, Booty’s research covers Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron, who reportedly was possibly communicating with a retired federal agent within as little as 30 minutes of his killing spree. Gendron’s possible links to a retired federal agent are more bizarre when coupled with a July 2019 story from the Buffalo News about FBI agents tracking potential mass shooters in the area.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
