Jacksonville shooting being investigated as hate crime
The US Justice Department has opened a hate-crime investigation into a shooting incident that killed three Black people in Florida on Saturday.
21-year-old Ryan Christopher Palmeter opened fire and killed the three Black people before fatally shooting himself at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville.
The shooting is being investigated as an act of racially motivated violent extremism, said Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The FBI will also investigate the shooting as a hate crime, said Sherri Onks, the FBI special agent for Jacksonville.
President Joe Biden said on Sunday that “white supremacy has no place in America.” Palmeter was white.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis viewed the gunman as a “hateful lunatic.”
“He was targeting people based on their race; that is totally unacceptable.”
Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan also slammed white supremacy at a gathering to honor the victims of the shooting.
“The division has to stop, the hate has to stop, the rhetoric has to stop,” Deegan said.
“We are all the same flesh, blood and bones and we should treat each other that way.”
The deadly incident is the latest in a series of racially-motivated shooting sprees in the United States.
In May 2022, a self-declared white supremacist, Payton Gendron, killed 10 Black people in a live-streamed shooting rampage at a supermarket in New York State. Gendron was sentenced to life in prison but still could face the death penalty in a federal case.
In 2015, a white gunman killed nine Black people during a Bible study at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. The shooter, Dylann Roof, is currently on death row.
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