The gunman who killed two women at a Tallahassee, Florida yoga studio on Friday before killing himself was a misogynist extremist with a record of arrests for groping women.
Scott Beierle posted a series of first-person videos on his YouTube account in 2014, calling women “whores” and threatening violence against women who sexually rejected him, as Buzzfeed News first reported.
Tallahassee Police identified the 40-year-old as the man who opened fire at the Hot Yoga Tallahassee studio, killing Nancy Van Vessem and Maura Binkley and injuring five others.
In one video uncovered by Buzzfeed, Beierle name-checked Elliot Rodger, who released a manifesto about his hatred for women before going on a shooting rampage in Santa Barbara, California in 2014. Rodger is lionized in the “incel” or “involuntarily celibate” community.
“I’d like to send a message now to the adolescent males… that are in the position, the situation, the disposition of Elliot Rodger, of not getting any, no love, no nothing,” Beierle said in the video. “This endless wasteland that breeds this longing and this frustration. That was me, certainly, as an adolescent,” he said.
Alek Minassian, who murdered 10 people and injured 15 others in Toronto earlier this year, referenced “the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger” in a Facebook post shortly before his attack.
CBS News reported that Beierle had been arrested at least twice for groping women in public.