I’m timid about this and might be late to a party where others already had this idea, so please, no haters.
I can’t get over how facile and stupid the identification of LM was at a McDoballs. This is someone who fell off the entire grid for three months??
Just asking… but couldn’t an organization trying to conceal its reach and inevitability track a fella… and then… force an identification?
I do not have any idea about details… it’s broad strokes. Could it be? How many other privacy lovers heard about these three months completely off the grid somehow and also wondered… how?
Please pardon if this isn’t the appropriate place but the real theme is privacy. What if the watchers are always watching even when a person might believe they have made themself completely digitally invisible?
The most likely story I have heard is that these automated kiosks at McDonalds have built in face-recognition, but there is no officially legal agreement between law-enforcement and McDonalds to share this data, so they hushed it up with the unlikely story that an employee recognized Luigi.
Indeed! Someone should get this opinion around in the news media.
Yep. The cops & feds regularly use illegal means to gather evidence. Then they make up a story about how they could have hypothetically gathered it legally.
It’s called “parallel construction,” and it needs to be explicitly outlawed.
This story has parallel construction written all over it.
There is a certain smell of parallel construction. I hope his legal team is very thorough in examining every little detail, tearing apart time-lines of events, chains of custody, witnesses and find any holes at all in the public narrative if this is the case. One hopes that the parallel construction is in the way of they used illegal surveillance and intelligence capabilities to catch him and it could bring their whole case down, not in the way of they made up a claim that someone at McDonalds called the cops but really they were doing basic legal detective stuff tracking greyhound buses.
Mcds is a red herring. They tracked him via the Greyhound bus database. He was dumb and rose the bus using the same fake id. The bus just happened to stop at a mcds when they caught up with it. .
What greyhound buses are stopping at a McDonalds?
Rest stop/ travel center. Combination Gas station and a couple/few fast food restaurants, depending on the size of the interstate.
Though considering it’s Altoona, that doesn’t work. He would have gotten off the bus down at the station, and the closest McDonald’s to there is like 4 blocks away
Most Greyhound routes do.
I personally don’t think he did it. He could easily be a grifter trying to take credit for a very popular act. There’s no shortage of those. All you’d need to do:
- Walk into a public place with a bag of somewhat incriminating items, but nothing that’s linked to the actual crime scene.
- Arouse enough suspicion to get the cops called on you. Being a white guy with black hair and a hoodie is not enough for someone to call the cops on you, I have no idea why people believe that was enough for a McD’s employee to call the cops.
- Claim credit for the shooting to the cops.
- Bonus points - Have a social media history praising similar actions.
The altoona cops then forwarded this to the NYPD, who were desperate to pin this on someone, after they messed up and let the shooter slip through their fingers. Out of the all the tips, this was the best one they’d gotten so far, so they’re running with it now.
This also explains why Luigi’s taking credit for some, but not all of the claims the police made (especially about the money he was supposedly carrying).
And get the death penalty? What?
- He couldn’t possibly know they’d go for that.
- Grifters don’t always think things like this through.
- A surprising # of people would probably willingly take the death penalty to get 15 minutes of fame, especially for an action as popular as this was.
I’m pretty cynical and I’m nowhere near this cynical.
Is your interest in this “the guy in custody is an imposter” theory is because we want so much for the actual act-doer to still be out there? I confess… I like that world. But a “hero” arising to assume the shooter’s identity feels even more fantastical than my original musing that covert agencies are trying to hide their existence by having a wage slave take credit for calling this in.
So… someone who happens to look like the the person captured on the videos has the wherewithal to craft the manifesto and fabricate the 3D printed gun parts, and also wants to… do this so that he can become famous or gum up the machinery of justice? Seriously, I’m not tracking.
Three months? And no one correcting you on that? WTF? Couple of days between shooting and arrest…!
Other than that: yeah, unlikely anyone could recognize anyone from those pubished photos.
I heard that he went into hiding months before the actual shooting.
And how is that relevant to the authorities “not being able to find” someone when they are not looking for that person? oO
I only mentioned it because it was a detail you might not have heard?
You wrote in OP
I can’t get over how facile and stupid the identification of LM was at a McDoballs. This is someone who fell off the entire grid for three months??
That directly juxtaposes the seemingly easy identification with an implication/presumption/insinuation/allegation that authorities were unable to find someone for 3 months. Since they were not looking, the original statement as such is pointless.
It establishes how careful his behavior was during those three months. Obviously he was not famous for murder during that time, but it might lead us to believe that a person living on a post pandemic world and seeking to remain anonymous might have chosen a mask at Mc Ds? For that matter… why not on the sidewalk where the event happened?
So you could show printed faces of people on the run at the self at a mcdonalds …
I wholly believe the same. If LM used a mobile device of any kind at any point during his mission, it would be possible to trace his whereabouts and match the path of the shooter to the path of LM. I further believe that the fast food industry (specifically MDs and its associations that lobby to continue the rampant unchecks of processed food) is behind the hit. Or at the very least, is using it as a PR opportunity to deflect blame of health problems in America to the health insurance industry. They are, after all, facing another lawsuit for causing diabetes that was officially filed on the same week as the shooting: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrmbomype/Martinez v Kraft Heinz et al complaint 12-10.pdf
Md and Starbucks are business partners. How convenient that every mention of this case is accompanied by both their names being lauded as the hero who put a “terrorist” behind bars.
