KALAMAZOO, Mich. — Investigators say they are baffled. Neighbors are totally bewildered. All around this traumatized city, residents wonder whether they will ever learn why Jason Brian Dalton allegedly gunned down random strangers while picking up fares for Uber.
This week, as police continued looking for clues into Saturday’s shootings, so did people close to him. One neighbor was puzzled to learn Dalton, 45, was driving for Uber and not working for Progressive Insurance anymore.
“He left every morning at 8 a.m. like he was going to work,” the neighbor said.
Where he was going, what he was enduring, what he was thinking — mass-shooting experts say all these fragments will eventually coalesce into a motive that probably made perfect sense to the killer, even if it’s incomprehensible to everyone else.
“In these cases, people typically don’t just snap and go berserk,” said James Alan Fox, a Northeastern University criminologist and author of several books on mass murders. “It may seem senseless, but there’s always a reason.”
For investigators, sorting that out takes time. For everyone else, the waiting is agonizing, a cruel ritual in the age of mass shootings. So far, all investigators have been able to offer is Dalton’s statement that “he took people’s lives.”
“This first thing I thought of was, why?” said Kalamazoo resident Lisa Stavish, 33. “Everyone I know is talking about it, but no one really knows anything.”
In some mass shootings, the reason is almost immediately apparent.
A married couple in San Bernardino stockpiled bombs and ammunition for a shooting motivated by radical Islamist beliefs. In Colorado, a religious drifter with bitter beliefs about abortion is charged with killing three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic. Dylann Roof, who had expressed his hatred of African-Americans, stands accused of killing nine of them at a church in Charleston, S.C.
But most mass shootings aren’t that simple to unravel. Experts say they typically combine precipitating events that might seem like everyday problems — work, money, love — with undiagnosed or untreated mental health issues. Sometimes the idea for a mass shooting unfolds over months. Other times, it’s days.
“It’s not something he did spontaneously,” Fox said.
In many ways, Dalton fits the typical profile of a mass shooter — a white male with no criminal record, no psychological impairment known to those around him, and the ability to legally purchase firearms.
What makes him different, Fox said, is that he “killed people in the wrong place at the wrong time.” That is, he targeted total strangers without a specific setting.
Most mass killers, even if they target strangers, single out specific places for attacks. Students pick schools. Disgruntled workers pick their workplaces. Those making political statements choose symbolically important places.
Dalton’s setting was the entire city of Kalamazoo, making his motive more difficult to piece together.
