The man, who shot dead five people in the US state of Colorado at the beginning of the week, apparently announced his deeds in several science fiction novels and named the victims. “We are aware of the books that the suspect wrote under a pseudonym,” a Denver police spokesman said Thursday. “You are part of our investigation.”
The shooter who was shot by the police had written a trilogy of novels under a pseudonym between 2018 and 2020. According to US media reports, in the first volume a man in a building in Denver kills a man of the same name as one of the victims of Monday’s gun attack – at the address given in the book.
In another volume the author describes the murder of a woman. Among the victims on Monday is the owner of a tattoo parlor who has the same name as the character killed in the novel. The Sagittarius had written on his author’s website that in his books he used “real names and real events and real people together with fictional ones, because I want to blur the lines between what is and what is possible”.
The 47-year-old shot five people in various locations in Denver and adjacent Lakewood on Monday. Two crime scenes were tattoo parlors. The attacker was eventually shot dead by a policewoman.
The man’s motive is still unclear. According to the police, the attacker had private or business relationships with some of his victims. He had “targeted certain people”.