Allen, Texas, Killer Posted Neo-Nazi, Incel Content Online
Mauricio Garcia, the man who shot and killed eight people and injured seven others in a shooting spree at an outlet mall in Allen, Texas, posted neo-Nazi and incel content to a Russian website and to YouTube.
Garcia, 33, whom police shot and killed at the scene of the massacre he perpetrated, posted to the Russian site Odnoklassniki, or ok.ru, handwritten material indicating that he read The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website. He also made repeated references encouraging violence against women, celebrating rape and murder, and using the vocabulary of the male supremacist incel, or involuntarily celibate, community.
Garcia’s social media history suggests he has a long history with fringe radical-right internet communities, due to the frequency with which he referred to their esoteric symbols and memes. He posted to Odnoklassniki photos of hand-drawn symbols associated with the radical right, including “Deus Vult” crosses, SS lightning bolts, swastikas and references to “right wing death squads,” a meme that celebrates extrajudicial killing on behalf of a fascist state. He also drew and posted photos of helicopters, which reference the killing of dissidents under the 20th-century regime of authoritarian Chilean President Augusto Pinochet. Garcia also shared photos that appear to be selfies on Odnoklassniki showing that he tattooed the logo of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, a Nazi-era paramilitary organization, and a swastika on his body sometime between 2022 and 2023.
Garcia also posted lengthy misogynist tirades to his Odnoklassniki account, often using derogatory terms for women, including “sandwich maker” and “baby factory,” along with more typical slurs. He reposted content from a forum popular among incels using the words “foid” and “Stacy,” terms incels use to dehumanize and stereotype women. One post that appears to be written by Garcia was titled “Nymphet,” a term coined by Vladimir Nabokov in his novel Lolita and favored by his pedophile protagonist to sexualize young girls.
Garcia’s “Nymphet” post begins, “I hate women. Their [sic] I’ve said it.”
In another post, a photo of a handwritten document with the Batman insignia drawn at the top, Garcia detailed the racist intersections of his misogyny, expressing particular animus toward Indian women. One of the victims of his massacre at the Texas mall was a young engineer from India.
Garcia may have also recently joined one of the most predominant incel forums. Someone with a username psycovision registered an account on that forum on April 28, but never posted. On April 15 and April 25 “PsycoVision 5” copied multiple posts from the forum onto his Odnoklassniki profile. On Monday, members of the site appeared to confirm that “PsycoVision 5” was a member and copied the posts.
The U.S. Army removed Garcia due to mental health concerns, according to law enforcement officials. Some of his posts on the Russian site celebrate violence, detached from any apparent connection to ideology. He posted his drawings of what looks like chalk outlines of corpses, toe tags on dead bodies, and streams of blood. The material that Hatewatch reviewed also indicates that Garcia visited Allen Outlet Mall prior to the attack and uploaded screenshots from Google Maps to Odnoklassniki indicating that the location experiences high traffic at the time of day when he killed his victims. He also used his account to share images of firearms and documents showing the purchase of firearms from multiple gun sales websites.
Garcia’s social media history also suggests he consumed more mainstream right-wing content that overlaps with fringe hate movements. He shared screenshots from multiple episodes of Timcast IRL, a far-right YouTube talk show hosted by Tim Pool, who has a history of platforming extremists as guests. Garcia made a positive reference to Libs of TikTok, the pseudonym of Chaya Raichik, who posts anti-LGBTQ+ commentary on mainstream platforms including Substack and Twitter. He also lauded the activities and beliefs of the white nationalist and antisemite Nick Fuentes, and highlighted more than one of his appearances on easily accessible online talk shows.
Garcia also referenced the white nationalist non-profit VDARE in his social media history. Even before police released Garcia’s name to the public, VDARE stressed to their audience that the killer appeared to be Latino, playing up anti-immigrant tropes that would be familiar to their audience.
Radical-right terrorists and others who have committed acts of violence have frequented Anglin’s site The Daily Stormer in the past. Dylann Roof, the man who murdered nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, frequented its comment section. New Mexico school shooter William Edward Atchison also frequented the site. Payton Gendron, who murdered 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, last May, also cited Anglin’s website as one of the publications that influenced his worldview.
Pool has hosted a variety of radical-right figures on Timcast IRL, including Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys, whom a jury recently convicted of seditious conspiracy for his role in shaping the pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. Pool has also hosted extremists including Jack Posobiec, Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes. Google, the parent company of YouTube, and Pool have profited from that site’s “super chat” function, which enables people to highlight their commentary on videos in exchange for money. Timcast IRL viewers used that function to celebrate violence in the run-up to and aftermath of the attack on the Capitol.
Hatewatch reached out to Andrew Anglin, the editor of The Daily Stormer, for a comment on this story. Hatewatch also reached out to Tim Pool and Google, the parent company of YouTube, which hosts and allows for the monetization of his show, Timcast IRL. Hatewatch reached out to Raichik, Fuentes and VDARE. No one immediately responded to the requests for comment. Hatewatch will update this story with their responses if they offer them.
Hatewatch also reached out to a representative with the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Allen Police Department for comment regarding Garcia’s social media accounts and his involvement in the white power movement but did not hear back.
How Hatewatch verified Garcia’s social media presence
Hatewatch found the shooter’s profile and hundreds of text and image posts on the Russian social media website Odnoklassniki, which is headquartered in Moscow. Albert Popkov, a Russian businessman, founded the website in 2006, and since then its primary user base includes residents of Russia and various former Soviet republics. Similarweb, a service for website popularity monitoring, ranks the site as the eighth most visited website in Russia, and the second most popular social media app after VKontakte. Both VKontakte and Odnoklassniki are owned by the same company.
Odnoklassniki isn’t popular in the U.S., even among extremists.
Garcia, who posted there beginning on April 2, 2020, under the username “PsycoVision 5,” listed his date of birth on the website as Oct. 24, 1989. The date on “PsycoVision 5’s” page matches Garcia’s date of birth, according to information that Hatewatch reviewed from various people-finding services. “PsycoVision 5” also posted a hand-drawn photo on April 17 of what appears to be feet with a toe tag commonly used to identify corpses. The tag includes various personal data, including Garcia’s full name and age. Whoever drew the picture added a date of June 10, 2020, to it in the upper right-hand corner. Garcia would have been 31 years old on June 10, 2020, which matches the age listed on the drawing.
“PsycoVision 5” also uploaded multiple photos throughout 2022 and 2023 that match the description of the shooter.
On March 12, 2022, “PsycoVision 5” shared a photo of a hand tattoo that resembles the logo of the city of Dallas. A photo of Garcia’s dead body that users circulated on social media after police shot him on May 6 shows he had a similar tattoo on his hand.
Then, on April 21, in the run-up to the attack, “PsycoVision 5” shared a photo of a tactical vest with three badges. Two of the badges feature the Punisher comic book character's skull logo, which is popular with antigovernment paramilitary groups and some members of law enforcement. The third reads “RWDS,” which is short for “Right Wing Death Squad.” The presence of the “RWDS” patch matches a description given by law enforcement of Garcia’s vest that he was wearing during the shooting. The “Psycovision 5” user also shared multiple photos and screenshots from what appears to be Allen Premium Outlets on April 16, less than a month before the attack at that location.
On May 6, a YouTube account using the display name “Dusty Shackleford” posted a video with the title “PsycoVision face reveal M Garcia.” The description of this video also contained a link to the “PsycoVision 5” profile on the Odnoklassniki site. The video shows a person who looks similar to Garcia. “Psycovision 5” explained the choice of names in a Jan. 11 post on the Odnoklassniki site, “I had to go with Dusty since these loser’s [sic] didn't take Rusty.” Rusty Shackleford is a fictional character from the television show “King of the Hill.”
YouTube has since removed the “Dusty Shackleford” account from YouTube for violating the platform’s terms of service.
“Dusty Shackleford” favorited over 370 videos on YouTube, including a variety of clips referencing mass shootings, as well as content from various prominent far-right figures. Among the videos that “Shackleford” liked was footage from a torch-lit march prior to the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia; a song from a channel called “IncelMusic”; and a series of clips about Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that left 26 children and staff members dead.
Garcia also shared some of the videos that he liked on YouTube on Odnoklassniki under his “PsycoVision 5” pseudonym. On April 16, the same day that “PsycoVision 5” uploaded photos from Allen Premium Outlets, he shared a screenshot of a now-deleted interview that Fuentes conducted with the YouTuber JustPearlyThings on March 1. The video that Garcia shared came from another YouTube user, “Music and Extra,” who re-uploaded Fuentes’ interview with JustPearlyThings on March 26.
Rachael Fugardi contributed to this report.
Lead photo by Joe Raedle via Getty Images
