Police found extremist material during a search of a Nevada home they believe the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter once rented, according to law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.
The seized material pertained to different — and at times, competing — political ideologies, and authorities have yet to nail down a clear ideology to which Santino Legan subscribed, the source said.
The news came two days after police searched the same home in Walker Lake, about 100 miles southeast of Reno, and seized several weapons accessories and computer hardware. The home is about a six-hour drive from Gilroy.
As authorities continue to investigate what led Legan to kill a 6-year-old boy, a 13-year-old girl and a man in his 20s while injuring a dozen others, ranging in age from 12 to 69, a mixed picture of the gunman has emerged.
While Legan’s social media activity suggests he had xenophobic or racist tendencies, a neighbor said he and his family seemed like nice people. And while former classmates said he didn’t stand out, a Gilroy High School employee described him as a troublemaker who was “difficult to manage” when he actually showed up for class.
See the happy, haunting moments before the shooting
In addition to Tuesday’s search of the Walker Lake home, investigators have searched the car Legan drove to the festival as well as family homes in Gilroy. They’re also continuing a forensic analysis of his digital media, including his social media posts, according to the law enforcement source who shared information on the extremist materials.
On an Instagram account bearing Legan’s name, created shortly before the Gilroy shooting, a post the day of the attack featured a photo of Smokey the Bear and a sign saying, “Fire Danger High Today.”
The caption read, “Read Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Why overcrowd towns and pave more open space to make room for hordes of mestizos and Silicon Valley white tw**s?”
A mestizo is a person of mixed descent, commonly white and Hispanic or white and American Indian.
“Might is Right,” first published in the late 1800s, has been described as a white supremacist text that promotes anarchy while vilifying Christianity. The book calls Jesus the “true Prince of Evil” and says that the natural order is a world at war in which the strong must vanquish the weak and white men must rule over those of color.
During a search of the Walker Lake home, which Mineral County District Attorney Sean Rowe said police believe Legan used in the days prior to the shooting, the FBI also found several weapon-related items, computer equipment and an empty bottle of the anxiety medicine diazepam, also known as Valium. The prescription was not in his name, according to the FBI receipt of seized property.
Among the items listed in the FBI’s receipt were a bulletproof vest, gas mask, a rifle box, empty ammunition boxes, a pocket knife, a bag containing pamphlets about guns, a sack of ammo casings, three hard drives, three thumb drives and a computer tower.
