A US military veteran and former teacher who railed at women and blacks in a series of videos has shot dead two women and wounded five others at a Florida yoga studio before killing himself.
The Friday evening shooting at a busy upscale shopping plaza jolted the state capital and police said they were still searching for a motive that led to the deaths of a Florida State University student and a well-known local doctor who was a member of the school faculty.
But details about 40-year-old Scott Paul Beierle began to emerge in the hours after, including that he had once been banned from FSU's campus and had been arrested twice for grabbing women.
Beierle, who had moved to the central Florida town of Deltona after getting a graduate degree from FSU, also posted a series of videos on YouTube in 2014 where he called women "whores" if they dated black men, said many black women were "disgusting" and described himself as a misogynist. He said promiscuous women deserved to be crucified and he suggested putting up land mines to keep people from crossing into the US from Mexico. The existence of the videos was first reported by BuzzFeed.
In one video, he likened his adolescent self to Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old who killed six students and wounded more than a dozen others near the University of California, Santa Barbara, before killing himself in 2014. Rodger was a self-identified "incel," short for "involuntary celibate".
Tallahassee police say Beierle shot six people and pistol-whipped another after walking into the yoga studio near the city's fashionable midtown neighbourhoods. Tallahassee Police Chief Michael DeLeo said some in the studio showed courage by trying to stop him.
Police responded within a few minutes, but by then Beirele had fatally shot himself, leaving police to search for a motive and a community to wonder what prompted the violence.
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