Alabama 4channer with body armor guns down three police officers, one fatally

While protesting Black Lives Matter activists and the FBI’s “black identity extremists” remain popular bogeymen in the eyes of law-and-order conservatives, a man in Alabama recently reminded us once again that, in fact, the most lethal threat to police lives from a radical terrorist element in the United States comes from the white far right.

Three police officers were shot, one of them fatally, when they responded to a domestic disturbance call in Auburn on Sunday night. The man arrested shortly afterward, it soon emerged—Grady Wayne Wilkes, 29, a veteran from Auburn—was fond of posting memes from the alt-right online gathering spot 4chan, most of them mock humor about guns, white nationalist trolling signals, and encouragement for Proud Boys-style violence against left-wing protesters, who he described as “leftist scum.”

J.J. MacNab, an extremism researcher at George Washington University, collected and posted samples of Wilkes’ social-media posts on Twitter.



Auburn Police said that the three officers—William Buechner, Webb Sistrunk, and Evan Elliott, all veterans of the department—shot by Wilkes had arrived at the scene of a domestic disturbance when he emerged suddenly, wearing body armor, and opened fire. Buechner was killed at the scene; Sistrunk and Elliott both survived, but remain hospitalized for their wounds.

Wilkes was arrested nine hours later, less than three miles away. In addition to the charges for shooting three police officers, he also faces attempted strangulation and domestic violence charges for his assault on the woman police found at the home.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/27/1859472/-Alabama-4channer-with-body-armor-guns-down-three-police-officers-one-fatally#read-more