Mauricio Garcia’s life in Texas amounted to what he once described online as “a stinking dead end.”
When he showed up to an outlet mall in Allen, Tex., on May 6, heavily armed and wearing a “Right Wing Death Squad” patch, Garcia’s rage had festered for more than a decade, according to diary-style social media posts attributed to him by extremism monitors and investigative journalists. As early as 2013, when Garcia was in his 20s, the posts expressed violent, hateful views that only hardened in the years leading up to the shooting in which eight people were killed, plus the gunman.
The collection of intimate, detailed posts offer a rare and disturbing look into the radicalization of a mass shooter. The mix of fringe beliefs fits into what extremism monitors call a pattern of recent attacks fueled by multiple violent ideologies, primarily those associated with the far right.
But the writings, alternately self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, stop short of answering why a man who seethed for at least 10 years finally exploded this month. The hundreds of online missives The Washington Post reviewed didn’t explain the timing or say why he zeroed in on Allen Premium Outlets.
The Texas Department of Public Safety said Tuesday that the motive remains unclear but that the shooter harbored “neo-Nazi ideation.” Garcia, 33, had no criminal history and was not on law enforcement’s radar before the massacre.
“His personal demons alone might have driven him to the crime,” Mark Pitcavage, an extremism researcher at the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in an analysis of the posts that called Garcia a “disturbed, hateful man,” but concluded that no overarching motive could be discerned.
Though many assailants publish glory-seeking screeds or live-stream their attacks, few come close to the “voluminous writings” Garcia left behind, according to the ADL report. The diary-style entries, many scribbled on notebook paper and posted online, chronicled the bleak life of a Dallas-area man who bounced from job to job, despised Asians and other people of color, saw himself as a woman-hating “incel,” and yearned for an apocalyptic race war.
“Everything I’ve seen shows that this is about the most textbook mass shooter you’ll ever find, and he tells you about it every step of the way,” tweeted Bellingcat researcher Aric Toler in a detailed thread about the posts. “He’ll be a reference point for decades on mass shooters because he shared so much.”
Garcia posted hundreds of photos of handwritten diary entries, dating back to 2013, and other materials to his account, since removed, on a Russian social media platform. One photo was of a notebook with “Diary of a psychopathic man child” scrawled on the cover. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, according to the dates on the posts, Garcia visited the Allen outlet mall and used Google to figure out when it was busiest. He also gave a video tour of his apartment and filmed a dramatic “face reveal” clip in which he peels off a “Scream” mask and speaks unintelligibly with a voice distorter.
In much of the diary, which begins in 2013, he describes creepy, stilted interactions with women in their workplaces, especially nude dancers at the adult entertainment clubs he frequented.
Garcia also reposted content from a forum dedicated to “incels” — or “involuntarily celibate” men, who believe they are unfairly deemed unattractive and who often blame their problems on women. The movement is linked to a spate of attacks in the last few years.
Some of the stories Garcia recounted in the posts presaged violence, with women singled out for rape and attack fantasies. On some occasions, he wrote, he brought that desire to terrorize women into real-life encounters.
In 2014, for example, he wrote that he asked a young female bank worker if she knew what a psychopath was and told her that he wanted to work as an assassin.
“Killing people is how I want to make my living,” he wrote. The woman “was smiling at me like I was joking. But I was dead serious.”
In 2017, Garcia described harassing a female fast food worker by acting out a mock arrest and referencing a sexual act. He returned to the restaurant multiple times to try to talk to her, he wrote, making the worker uncomfortable.
In one entry, he described running into women who attended high school with him and who had gone on to university. “It made me feel so small,” Garcia wrote, referring to the women with a misogynistic term and adding that he now felt superior to them. In reality, however, Garcia appeared to be struggling, lamenting in several posts about being laid off from a string of low-wage jobs.
Neo-Nazi ideology was another central theme of the writings, with swastikas showing up alongside band logos and anime-style drawings from at least 2013. At some point in recent years, according to the photos and notes, he tattooed Nazi symbols on his chest and arm.
Amid the fraught politics surrounding mass shootings, Garcia’s affinity for white-supremacist movements was seized upon by right-wing commentators to discredit the idea of racial animus as a motive. How, they asked their millions of followers, could “the left” expect Americans to be persuaded into thinking that a Brown man could be a murderous neo-Nazi?
But recent years have seen a rise in Black and Brown extremists who embrace far-right movements for reasons linked to identity and power, terrorism analysts say. Henry “Enrique” Tarrio, the Afro-Latino former leader of the far-right Proud Boys who was convicted this month of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, is perhaps the most notable of many examples.
Garcia wrestled with his own ethnicity, at times openly wishing he weren’t Hispanic. In one entry, Garcia said he walked around a local grocery story wearing a shirt that proclaimed, “It’s Okay To Be White,” a slogan used frequently by white-supremacist groups. In another instance he described in his writings, someone asked whether he was Hispanic, and Garcia said he replied, “Yuck don’t remind me.”
Still, the posts also revealed moments when Garcia spoke affectionately about his family and expressed pride in “la raza” — “the people” — though his assertions of Hispanic identity struck some as clumsy or performative. A reporter attempted to interview Garcia’s relatives at a family residence, but they did not respond.
“The weird dude,” recalled Jorge Nila of Jorge’s Barber Shop, where Garcia went for haircuts. He said that something about Garcia seemed off, so he kept their interactions to small talk, nothing deep. He said they chatted about dogs or work — benign topics that never signaled that Garcia was brimming with hate.
Nila recalled that Garcia would make a show of saying goodbye in Spanish on his way out, loudly calling out, “Viva la raza!”
Nila hadn’t noticed the Nazi tattoos but said his son had spotted them, an observation shared only after authorities had identified Garcia as the shooter.
“I was like — why didn’t you tell me that?” Nila said. “He’s already weird as it is. That would’ve been like, ‘Hold up, what the hell is wrong with this dude?’”