By Aaron Miller-
Robert Crimo, the suspect in the mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, is expected to appear in court on Wednesday, a day after he was charged with seven counts of first-degree murder.f
Robert E. Crimo III, 21, is convicted, the charges could lead to a mandatory life sentence, Rinehart said. More charges are expected to come, Rinehart said, including attempted murder, aggravated discharge and aggravated battery charges.
“These are just the first of many charges that will be filed against Mr. Crimo, I want to emphasize that,” Rinehart said, adding he anticipates “dozens of more charges centering around each of the victims.”
Crimo has been in police custody since being apprehended Monday evening.
“Tomorrow morning at the Lake County courthouse, we will ask a judge to hold Mr. Crimo without the possibility of bail,” Rinehart said.
According to cops, Mr Crimo had planned an attack for weeks and fired more than 70 rounds randomly into the crowd watching the parade, killing seven and injuring more than three dozen people.
He had his first encounter with the police in April 2019, when the authorities received a 911 call reporting an attempted suicide, said Lake County Sheriff deputy chief Christopher Covelli on Tuesday. In September that year police were again called regarding alleged threats “to kill everyone” that he had directed at family members, though they did not arrest him.
The names of six of the seven victims have been released: Katherine Goldstein, 64, Irina McCarthy, 35, Kevin McCarthy, 37, Jacquelyn Sundheim, 63, Stephen Strauss, 88, and Nicolas Toledo-Zaragoza, 78.
Crimo faces life without parole after being charged with seven counts of first degree murder
The shooting caused toddlers to abandon tricycles and parents to run for safety with their children, turning a civic display of patriotism into a scene of panicked mayhem.
“It sounded like fireworks going off,” said retired doctor Richard Kaufman, who was standing across the street from where the gunman opened fire, adding he heard about 200 shots.
“It was pandemonium. A stampede. Babies were flying in the air. People were diving for cover,” he said.
“People were covered in blood tripping over each other.”
The mayor said she remembers him as “just a little boy” when she knew him as a Cub Scout.
Local police said that he wasn’t even on their radar.
But a close look at Robert Crimo’s online presence tells a very different story.
Across multiple platforms, the 21-year-old often posted disturbing and violent videos including one of a beheading.
The amateur rapper, who goes by the stage name “Awake the Rapper”, celebrated death and glamourised school shootings in one of his music videos, culminating in the gunman being shot dead by police.
There’s also the unexplained obsession with the number 47 – which is the date for July 4 backwards.
A trail of disturbing online posts including videos glorifying school shootings and mass violence have raised questions whether red flags were missed.
Robert Crimo attended a Donald Trump rally dressed up as the character from “Where’s Waldo”.Mr Crimo appears to be a supporter of the former president – who is currently himself the focus of an investigation in Congress over the January 6 Capitol riot.
The 21-year-old, who posted disturbing videos online ahead of Monday’s massacre, was pictured in the Waldo outfit at a Trump rally in Northbrook, Illinois, in September 2020.
He posted a selfie of himself at the event with a Trump 2020 flag seen in the background.
The type of gun used in the Highland Park 4 July shooting that killed seven and wounded over three dozen was a high-powered rifle “similar to an AR-15”, police said at a briefing on Tuesday.
Authorities initially said they had recovered a “rifle” from along the parade route, and that they were deliberately withholding further details as they hunted for the gunman.
Sgt Christopher Covelli, from the Lake County Major Crime Task Force, later revealed the gunman had scaled a fire escape and fired more than 70 rounds down onto the crowd from a business rooftop.
When the gunfire erupted just after 10am CDT, hundreds of parade-goers in Highland Park fled leaving prams, clothes and pools of blood strewn along the route in Highland Park.
In videos of the incident, the heavy, staccato sound of semi-automatic gunfire was unmistakable.
“We heard 20 to 30 rounds,” Letham Burns told NBC News.
“It definitely was semi-automatic, in a rapid cadence.”
The ‘high-powered rifle’ used in the Highland Park shooting was bought legally. A gun reform package passed last month failed to raise the age the ‘weapons of war’ could be purchased
Marjorie Taylor Greene admitted to spreading a photoshopped photo as she doubled down on a series of baseless claims about the mass shooting at a 4 July parade in Highland Park, Illinois.
The Georgia representative, a first-term congresswoman who is known for promoting outlandish conspiracy theories, began her bizarre assertions hours after the shooting on Monday when she suggested that suspected gunman Robert Crimo’s rampage could be blamed on illicit drug abuse or the side effects of commonly-used antidepressants.
Despite a lack of publicly available evidence indicating Mr Crimo was a drug user of any sort, Ms Greene took to Twitter late on Monday to say anyone not buying into her claims was part of a coverup on behalf of the pharmaceutical industry.
One survivor of the massacre recalled leaving her dead mother and running to safety
Cassie Goldstein, 22, told the tragic story of how she was forced to leave her dead mother and run to safety.
“I was standing there with my mom, and I heard what I thought were firecrackers firing into the street across from me. And then I looked up and I saw the shooter shooting down at the kids,” Ms Goldstein told NBC New Tuesday.
“And I told her that it was a shooter and that she had to run.”
They were running side to side when her mother, Katherine Goldstein, 64, was hit by a bullet in the chest and fell to the ground.
“I knew she was dead,” she said. “I just told her that I loved her, but I couldn’t stop, because he was still shooting everyone next to me.”
She told the outlet that she “kept running” and “hid behind a trash can”.
Her mother was among the seven people killed in the mass shooting during a 4 July parade. “She was just a good mom. And I got 22 years with her. And I got to have 22 years with the best mom in the world.”
Community members embrace at a memorial site near the parade route the day after a mass shooting at 4 July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois.
Vice president Kamala Harris on Tuesday evening visited the site of the shooting, offering condolences to first responders and local officials. The vice president was already in Chicago to address the National Education Association’s annual meeting.
“The whole nation should understand and have a level of empathy, to understand that this can happen anywhere, in any peace loving community,” Ms Harris said in brief comments to reporters in Highland Park.
US vice president Kamala Harris accompanied by second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Highland Park mayor Nancy Rotering, talks with police officers during a surprise visit to the site of a shooting“. And we should stand together and speak out about why it’s got to stop.”
‘Preliminary examination of internet history indicated Crimo researched mass killings’
Federal agents reviewing Robert Crimo’s online profiles, in a preliminary examination of his internet history, found that he had researched mass killings. He had downloaded multiple photos depicting violent acts, including a beheading, a law enforcement official said.
The official could not discuss details of the investigation publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Amateur Rapper
Robert E Crimo is an amateur rapper who goes by the stage name ‘Awake the Rapper’ and has more than 16,000 listeners per month on his Spotify page with a net worth of $100,000 (£82,645)
Aiden McCarthy’s photo was shared across Chicago-area social media groups in the hours after the 4 July parade shooting in Highland Park, accompanied by pleas to help identify the two-year-old who had been found at the scene bloodied and alone and to reunite him with his family.
On Tuesday, friends and authorities confirmed that the boy’s parents, Kevin McCarthy, 37, and Irina McCarthy, 35, were among seven people killed in the tragedy.
“At two years old, Aiden is left in the unthinkable position; to grow up without his parents,” wrote Irina Colon on a GoFundMe account she created for the family and Aiden, who was reunited with his grandparents Monday evening.
Three months after Robert Crimo threatened to “kill everyone” in his home, he applied for his first Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card, under his father’s sponsorship.
But because no firearm restraining order or other court action against Mr Crimo had ever been sought, “there was insufficient basis to establish a clear and present danger and deny the FOID application,” state police said.
Mr Crimo passed four background checks in the purchase of his guns, all of them conducted in 2020 and 2021, well after the 2019 incidents that drew police attention, according to the state police.
State police said the only offence detected in Mr Crimo’s criminal history during background checks was for unlawful possession of tobacco in 2016, and that “no mental health prohibiter reports” from healthcare providers ever surfaced.
The state police said that when officers who visited the family’s home over the alleged threats Mr Crimo made in September 2019, they asked him “if he felt like harming himself or others,” and that “he responded ‘no’.”
“Additionally and importantly, the father claimed the knives were his and they were being stored in (his son’s) closet for safekeeping,” state police said. “Based upon that information, the Highland Park Police returned the knives to the father later that afternoon.”