During a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, a man suspected of killing six people and injuring more than a dozen others, is a rapper who backs Donald Trump and has a supposedly successful music career.
The 22-year-old rapper known as “Awake the Rapper,” Robert “Bobby” Crimo III, receives more than 16,000 monthly Spotify listeners.
A unsettling footage of Crimo putting shots on the floor of a classroom while wearing armour in what appears to be a joke about school shootings and a drawing of him shooting people online are among the music videos he posted online last fall.
The most recent image Crimo posted on his Discord server was a picture of Budd Dwyer, the Pennsylvania state treasurer who committed suicide on live television in the 1980s, with the caption, “I wish politicians still gave speeches like this.” Crimo also had a Discord server where he would chat with friends and admirers.
Along with talking violent portrayals of murder and death, he routinely commented on a message board and made references to suicide. One recent video he shared showed a beheading.
Crimo was “known to law enforcement,” however it is unclear at this point if this was as a result of the horrible internet information he published or if he was involved in other crimes.
Among those killed were 78-year-old grandfather Nicolas Toledo and married mother and synagogue instructor Jacki Sundheim. Four further people are still unnamed.
25 more victims, ranging in age from eight to 85, were shot. 6 patients are still in the hospital.
There have been 309 mass shootings in the US so far this year, in which four or more persons were shot or killed apart from the gunman. Over the holiday weekend, eleven events in all occurred.
Robert ‘Bobby’ Crimo III is pictured during his arrest after an hours-long manhunt following the massacre in which six people were killed