Connor Betts, the 24-year-old shooter, who shot nine people to death and wounded 27 in a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio on Sunday, had an extremely troubled past.
According to Betts' former high-school classmates, Betts was suspended from high school when he was 17 for making a "hit list" of girls he wanted to kill and a "rape list" of girls he wanted to rape. Former high school classmates from Bellbrook High School spoke out to the Associated Press about Betts' murky past after police said that Betts' had nothing in his background which precluded him from being allowed to purchase an assault-style rifle with extended ammunition magazines.
One classmate said that a police officer has called her at the time to tell her that her name was on the list. "The officer said he [Betts] wouldn't be at school for a while," she said. "But after some time passed he was back, walking the halls. They didn't give us any warning that he was returning to school." The Dayton Daily News said that the "hit list' incident was investigated by the police in 2012
According to AP, another former Bellbrook student wrote on Twitter or Sunday: "There was an incident in high school with this shooter that should have prevented him from ever getting his hands on a weapon. This was a tragedy that was 100% avoidable."
Dayton police said that Betts had no adult criminal history except for traffic violations.
“This isn’t a mystery to me,” a classmate told Dayton Daily News. “I’m furious.” The classmate, who asked to remain anonymous said that Betts once told her that he had a fantasy about tying her up and slitting her throat. He added that he knew his fantasy was macabre and that even he was scared of his thoughts. “He knew it wasn’t normal,” the classmate said. “He and I talked at length about him getting help.” The classmate added that she and her parents told the police about Betts' confession.
Another classmate told the Dayton Daily News that although he never had a problem with Betts, "he was always a bit of an oddball. He had a dark sense of humor — jokes about people dying. He would wear all black. I remember sensing a dark energy around him. I think this is less of a hate crime and more of an ‘I hate everybody’ crime. I honestly feel more comfortable now knowing that he’s gone.”
The Dayton Daily News also obtained Betts' old social media history and unearthed ten-year-old MySpace photos of sketches with captions such as "All Shall Be Annihilated,” “Bloodlust,” “Absolute Carnage” and “Bloody Massacre.”
According to Heavy which reviewed Bett's Twitter account before it was taken down several hours after the shooting, Betts was a self-described leftist who supported Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, socialism and praised Satan. Heavy notes that Bett's political views were the total opposite of the views of El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius, who supported Trump and was anti-immigration.
Betts posted an article in support of "The Quartet" - Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley. He also came out against white supremacists and shared posts about the “concentration camps” at the border.
In a sadly ironic twist, Betts railed against America's liberal gun laws “This is America: Guns on every corner, guns in every house, no freedom but that to kill,” he wrote in December 2018. But he also posted about his love for guns: “’Tis! The pistol is a Beretta 93R, called the REK7 in BO4. Do love me some guns!”
