During a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, a man suspected of killing six people and injuring more than a dozen others opened fire. This man 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 armor 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 police 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.
309 mass shootings in which four or more persons, excluding the perpetrator, were shot or killed, have already occurred in the US this year. Over the holiday weekend, eleven events in all occurred.
On yet another violent day in the US:
- The gunman stood on a roof shooting randomly at passersby at the Independence Day parade at 10.15am
- Revelers thought the gunfire was fireworks or part of the July 4 celebrations before people started to flee
- Five adults were killed at the scene and another died in hospital from their injuries, with dozens wounded
- Shooter fled in a Honda, sparking an eight-hour manhunt before his arrest after a car chase
- Police said he was ‘known to law enforcement’ and posted violent material online and in music videos
- His father is a local businessman who ran for mayor and mother is a Mormon alternative healer
- Joe Biden said he was ‘shocked’ and vowed to continue to fight against the ‘epidemic of gun violence’
- Two police officers were wounded in a shooting in Philadelphia hours later in another weekend of mayhem