WASHINGTON — An elderly man enters a crowded museum carrying a rifle and begins shooting. A young man in Arkansas pulls the trigger outside a military recruiting office. Another man opens fire in a Kansas church.
Three chilling, unconnected slayings in less than two weeks. One gunman was a white supremacist, one a militant Muslim, one a fervent foe of abortion.
Each suspect had a history that suggested trouble. Each apparently was driven to act by beliefs considered by some as extreme. Each shooter fits the description of a “lone wolf” terrorist, a killer whose attack, authorities say, is harder to head off than if planned by a trained terrorist network.
“It could be anyone. It could be the guy next door, living in the basement of his mother’s place, on the Internet just building himself up with hate, building himself up to a boiling point and finally using what he’s learned,” said John Perren, head of the counterterrorism branch at the FBI’s Washington field office.
Perren described the difficulty of hunting a lone-wolf suspect in an interview with The Associated Press just two days before white supremacist James von Brunn allegedly shot and killed a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
“The lone wolf is what concerns the Washington field office, what concerns the FBI the most,” he said.
When investigating a terrorist network, FBI agents can often access e-mails, phone records and documents to build a case. In some cases, they can develop informants to penetrate the group and provide intelligence.
But a killer acting alone rarely tells anyone what he’s planning, let alone when or how. That makes it difficult for authorities to determine who is prepared to commit a criminal act in furtherance of a perceived cause.
