FROM THE CORRESPONDENT TO WASHINGTON. After eight hours of manhunt, the 22-year-old was arrested yesterday evening around 8 pm (2 am in Italy). Park, a northern suburb of Chicago. His name is Robert E. Crimo III and he is 22 years old. The police had spotted him in the late afternoon calling him a “person of interest”. The main suspect remains but the authorities have not yet officially defined him as the perpetrator of the massacre. He was stopped driving his car, a gray Honda Fit in the Lake Forest area.
A few hours after the shooting – in which six people were killed and 26 were injured, some of whom are in danger of life – the police had disclosed a kind of identikit: the wanted man was a white male, black hair, thin build and he was wearing a blue t-shirt. In the evening, a photo of him was first released, then a few hours after his arrest.
The alleged killer is a rapper
At the moment we only know what appears on social media: rapper under the pseudonym Awake, several tattoos on his face and neck, a resident of the city where he probably carried out his massacre. In a photo of his Facebook profile, now obscured but relaunched by many Twitter users, the young man appears with a helmet and a small camera on his head and his face covered. Also on his page appears an image of a demonstration of the Patriot Front, a white supremacist organization. According to the police, however, at the moment there are not enough elements to give his gesture a political connotation.
Uncle to the Cnn: “We are good people”
Uncle spoke to the Cnn“We’re good people, this is devastating,” he said, describing his nephew, aka Bobby, as a quiet, lonely type. The night before the attack he was “at the computer in his room.” Yesterday was supposed to be a day of joy among parades, picnics, exhibitions and waiting for the traditional fireworks that close the Independence Day every year. Instead at 10.20 in the center of Highland Park all hell broke out. From a building there were shots and gusts at random. Panic broke out among the spectators and the protagonists of the parade and everyone sought shelter behind the walls, in the bottlenecks between the houses, in the ravines. On the road there are strollers, soft toys, flags, thermos, cooler bags, paraphernalia for a day of picnic. Around the bloodstains. The shooting ended at the exact moment the police arrived. At that moment the killer abandoned his position and vanished into thin air. A high-precision rifle was found at the scene of the shooting.
Law enforcement agencies: “Completely random act”
The police have armored the area, Chris O’Neil, county sheriff, has launched an appeal live on TV: “Stay indoors, the killer is armed and dangerous.” The police consider the gesture “a completely random act”. However, fear has spread throughout the Chicago area and many fireworks have been canceled. The stories of the witnesses are chilling, between people who have confused the “bam bam” of the rifle with the evidence of the fireworks and those who zigzagged to avoid the bullets, without really understanding where they came from. Zoe Pawelczak told the Cnn of having arrived at the parade with her father and having taken him by the arm and pushed him to run away after hearing the blows. “A girl less than five meters from me was hit and died.” And then again a wound in the ear, and a young man in the leg. Target shooting, “like a sniper in a war zone”.
Biden’s words: “I’m shocked”
President Biden said he was “shocked by the violence of meaningless weapons”. So he recalled having signed a law just 10 days ago to prevent the circulation of weapons. «What happened – he declared in a speech to the White House for Independence Day – he tells us that nothing is guaranteed and taken for granted. We have to fight for what we have ». In the evening there was also a shooting in Philadelphia during the parade for July 4th: two officers were injured. The manhunt has begun in the city. The attack on Highland Park is mass shooting number 308 this year according to the Gun Violence Archive, already eleven in early July.