The FBI is opening a domestic terrorism investigation into the shooting that killed three people, including two children, at a popular California food festival, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.
Nineteen-year-old gunman Santino William Legan fatally shot three people with a Romanian-made AK-47-style rifle before turning the gun on himself on July 28 at the popular Gilroy Garlic Festival. Thirteen others were injured.
Investigators have discovered Legan kept a list of targets on at least one digital device, John Bennett, the FBI special agent in charge in the San Francisco office, told a news conference on Tuesday.
One of those targets was the annual Gilroy Garlic Festival, a decades-old event celebrating produce farmed in the countryside of California that is held about 70 miles south of San Francisco.
"The shooter appeared to have an interest in varying, competing violent ideologies," Bennett told reporters.
"Due to the discovery of the target list, as well as other information we have encountered in this investigation, the FBI has opened a full domestic terrorism investigation into this mass shooting."
Before the shooting, Legan had posted on his Instagram page a photograph showing a sign warning of a high danger of forest fires. Its caption urged people to read "Might is Right," a racist and sexist treatise written in the 19th century.
Legan's target list had organizations from across the country and included religious institutions and political organizations affiliated with both the Democratic and Republican parties, Bennett said.
The FBI is notifying the groups that were on the list but will not publicly release the list, he said.
A separate mass shooting that killed 22 people at a crowded El Paso, Texas, store over the weekend is also being handled as a domestic terrorism case.
The FBI's move in Gilroy came as Keyla Salazar's family was set to hold a funeral mass Tuesday for the 13-year-old in San Jose.
Federal investigators have fewer tools and legal powers at their disposal in domestic terrorism cases than they do if they are up against someone tied to an international organization such as the Islamic State or al-Qaida.
Law enforcement officials conducting international terrorism investigations, for instance, can get a secret surveillance warrant to monitor the communications of a person they think may be an agent of a foreign power or terror group.
Similarly, the U.S. criminal code makes it a crime for anyone to lend material support to designated foreign terror organizations, including the Islamic State and al-Qaida, even if the investigation doesn't involve accusations of violence.
There's no domestic counterpart to that material support statute, meaning federal prosecutors must rely on hate crimes laws, weapons charges and other approaches that may not carry the terrorism label. Mere membership in, or support for, a white supremacist organization is not illegal.
Information from The Assocated Press and Reuters was used in this report.
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