Mexican shooter was a ‘psychopath’ who admired U.S. school shooters

MEXICO CITY — An attacker opened fire on tourists from a pyramid in one of Mexico’s famous archaeological sites, killing a Canadian woman and wounding 13 foreign visitors, including 6 from the United States. Mexican authorities said Tuesday that citizens were a copycat who admired foreign school shooters and meticulously planned the attack.

“Everything indicates that this person has psychological problems and was affected by events that occurred outside of Mexico,” Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said at the morning press conference.

The attacker, identified as Julián César Jasso Ramírez, 27, shot himself to death at the scene as police and National Guard troops climbed the steep steps of the Pyramid of the Moon to confront him in the Teotihuacán archaeological park, 40 kilometers northeast of Mexico City, shortly before midday Monday.

The site, which hosted nearly 2 million visitors last year, is among the most visited tourist attractions in Mexico.

The backpack found next to the gunman’s body contained literature related to other mass shootings, including the Columbine massacre in Colorado in 1999, authorities said.

Media reports here indicated that the killer was a far-right fanatic and admirer of Hitler. The attack occurred on April 20, which was both Hitler’s birthday and the anniversary of the Columbine school shooting.

Authorities said the killer used a single handgun from 1968: a .38 Special Smith and Wesson. He was also carrying a knife in his backpack. He took an Uber to the murder scene and stayed at a nearby hotel, surveilling the area and planning the attack for days, authorities said.

In the dramatic scene at the pyramid, the police and soldiers opened fire on the suspect while he was trying to escape and hide by scaring the tourists. Authorities said he was shot once in the foot before killing himself

Mexican officials described the incident as a one-off incident that should not frighten visitors in a country where tourism is vital to the economy, but promised that security at archaeological sites would be increased, possibly by installing metal detectors. Currently, visitors to most archaeological parks face very little screening.

“This has never happened before,” Sheinbaum said.

Monday’s shooting has raised concerns about Mexico’s vital tourism industry at a crucial moment.

Starting in June, Mexico will host matches of the World Cup football tournament, which is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world. Mexican officials were quick to repeat their previous claims that a strict regime was in place to protect the matches.

“We believe that the security of the World Cup is guaranteed,” Mexico’s federal security chief Omar García Harfuch told reporters.

Six victims remained hospitalized Tuesday, officials said. Among the injured were both visitors with gunshot wounds and those who injured themselves while trying to escape from the gunman in the 40-meter-high pyramid.

The only person who died was a Canadian woman. There are 6 US citizens among the injured.

Officials said that all of those injured were foreigners. It is not yet known whether the attacker deliberately targeted foreign visitors.

Mexico has a much higher murder rate than the United States and often experiences mass violence in the context of organized crime.

But Mexico has not traditionally been the site of what experts describe as “public mass shootings,” such as the 1999 incident at Columbine High School in which shooters opened fire at random in an attempt to gain notoriety.

And experts say foreigners are rarely targeted in Mexico’s frequent spasms of violence, much of which is linked to other rackets including cartel warfare, drug trafficking and extortion.

Violence experts say the largest percentage of such shootings worldwide occur in the United States, but they are also on the rise in other developed countries, including a recent spate of school shootings in Western Europe.

The internet provides broad access to online communities where mass shootings are idolized, said Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama who studies the global spread of mass shootings.

Lankford’s data shows an increase in mass shootings globally, with many shootings influenced by murders in the US

“Sometimes the United States has a product that goes global and is in fashion everywhere, like blue jeans or McDonald’s. That’s kind of a scary idea, but the same thing can happen with bad behavior, and that’s what the data we collected showed,” Lankford said.

“Attacking a national landmark fits the idea of ​​an attack for fame. Choosing a symbolic target is a way to almost guarantee yourself more attention,” he added.

Lankford said that attackers have a pattern of shooting from high places, citing as an example the shooting incident in which a gunman opened fire from the clock tower of the University of Texas in 1966 and killed 60 people by shooting from the 32nd floor of a hotel at a concert in Las Vegas in 2017.

Special correspondent Liliana Nieto del Río contributed.