“We’ll be aggressive in our pursuit of anyone who subscribes to the ideals professed by other White supremacists and how there’s a feeding frenzy on social media platforms where hate festers more hate,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Saturday.
Here are other high-profile massacres in recent years that authorities have said were fueled by hate.
A shooter ‘hated the Jewish community and Muslim community’
He was armed with an AR-15 style rifle when he entered the crowded Chabad of Poway synagogue and began shooting. He also admitted to setting fire to a mosque in nearby Escondido several weeks before the shooting.
“The defendant targeted his victims because he hated the Jewish community and Muslim community,” Randy Grossman, US attorney for the Southern District of California, previously said.
“The defendant and his hatred have been silenced. He will spend the rest of his days and die in prison, while he languishes behind bars,” Grossman said.
The deadliest attack on Latinos in modern US history
11 worshippers killed in a Pittsburgh synagogue
Federal prosecutors said in 2019 they would seek the death penalty on charges that include obstruction of free exercise on religious beliefs resulting in death, use and discharge of a firearm to commit murder and possession of a firearm during a violent crime.
They said they are justified to seek the death penalty because of the role that Bowers’ anti-Semitic views played in the shooting.
He has pleaded not guilty and is yet to be tried.
A Charleston church becomes a target
“Mother Emanuel was his destination specifically because it was an historically African American church of significance to the people of Charleston, of South Carolina and to the nation,” then-US Attorney General Loretta Lynch said in 2015. “On that summer evening, Dylann Roof found his targets, African-Americans engaged in worship.”
Roof spent months plotting the attack, Lynch said.
“He was looking for the type of church and the type of parishioners whose death would, in fact, draw great notoriety for…his racist views,” she said.
Attacker who had talked about a ‘racial holy war’
An Army veteran opened fire in a gurdwara — or Sikh house of worship — in the Milwaukee suburb of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people and wounding four others.
Then-Attorney General Eric Holder called the attack “an act of terrorism, an act of hatred, a hate crime.”
According to a man who described himself as an old Army buddy of Page’s, the attacker talked about “racial holy war” when they served together in the 1990s.
Christopher Robillard, of Oregon, who said he had lost contact with Page, added in 2012 that when Page would rant, “it would be about mostly any non-White person.”
