OK, that’s Mistake #3. The correct answer was “I’m not answering any questions without my lawyer present.”
Yup. Ever since my cataract operation I’ve worn sunglasses when outdoors, all year round, on my doctor’s advice to protect my new lens from ultraviolet light. Although wearing sunglasses indoors is another kettle of fish, unless you’re going for a too cool for the world vibe.
Overall, the parallels between this idiot and the Idaho college student who murdered 4 other college students by knife are striking.
IQ smart, socially clueless, way too much in his head, probably way too much in the wrong parts of the internet. And cocksure that this was a great idea. Until he found out it wasn’t.
Conspicuous in cloudy places. Less so if he’d made it to the southwest.
I’m reminded of how in the novel The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter initially hid out at an expensive hotel near a world-famous plastic surgery clinic, where people with bandages on their faces were commonplace.
ETA: What @eddyteddyfreddy said.
How do you deal with your glasses fogging up? If I’m out walking or biking on a cold night, I usually have glasses and a balaclava on, and unless I untuck my nose it takes about 5 seconds for my visibility to become zero. Probably not ideal if you’re planning to shoot someone.
The first poster I quoted was saying the McDonald’s employee’s life was in danger for snitching. I quoted you because you posted the facts about the killer everyone was falling in love with: he’s a dangerous person who isn’t worth supporting. Apologies for any confusion.
He kills people who work for big corporations where the product can have a negative impact on a person’s health. I would think any McDonald’s employee could be a target.
He wasn’t on the run because he shot your local State Farm agent’s receptionist. He killed a CEO. Your average McDonald’s worker is in about as much danger of being eaten by a tiger during their cigarette break.
The only thing I’m gonna say about the person who called it in is that if I were them I wouldn’t tell anyone it was me and I would quietly use the reward money to pay off some bills instead of buying anything flashy.
Another random paralllel: I read that Mangione worked at a nursing home, as did would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks.
Still, I do admit that this is a major reason for my hesitation condone such actions: that there are way too many stupid people who’ll take out their anger on the convenient face - the customer service worker, the manager who makes barely more than they do - rather than the true root of the issue, because those people (as we see now) are much harder to get to, and actually requires work and planning and thought, and most people want to be angry now.
My sunglasses don’t fog up unless I’m wearing a mask as I walk into the grocery store or wherever, but my regular glasses underneath fog a little, not as much as the fitover sunglasses, when I’m KN95-masked, until I fiddle with the pinch on the nose. Bloody annoying, but whaddaya gonna do?
Well, not try to shoot and hit a target when masked, sunglasses or regular lenses, unless I was a lot closer than the Adjuster.
Oh, I’m familiar with that. I once got a death threat because I refused to give someone a refund for a breakfast burrito on the grounds that they didn’t know what chorizo was when they ordered it. Another time I had a deranged individual tell me that Walmart was trying to kill him and that I was obligated by “brotherhood” and “honor” to defend him but that he’d kill me if I called the cops. People are crazy.
Honestly, if I’d been working the McDonald’s and seen this guy, I probably would’ve thought “that’s probably not him” and gone on with my life.
Thanks for the clarification. All good.
Going to McDonalds is never good for you.
That would be my problem too. I can’t imagine looking at a customer who is eating in a store and thinking, “I am so confident that that nose and jaw is indeed the nose and jaw from the news photo” that I’d call 911 on him. There could be ten thousand men in America with that same nose and jaw. I’d be very much thinking I’d embarrass myself and get the ire of a wrongfully-accused man.
The eyebrows would have been the tell for me.
I have to say that the person who called 911 was a lot more perceptive that I am and deserving of the reward that I presume they’ll get. I can definitely see a resemblance between the published security-cam photos and the full pictures of the perp, but I would probably not have had very high confidence that it was the same person.
Anyway, this guy made more than just a few mistakes – he seemed to be in the grip of huge overconfidence, as if getting out of NYC meant that he was now completely safe.
I’ve seen conflicting versions of that. One was that he lowered his mask to flirt with the hostel clerk, but the other was that she asked him to lower his mask to check him against his (fake) photo ID. If that was the case, then that was a reasonable thing to expect.
Hubris for sure. And from some of his reading list I’ve seen he may have had a bit of an “ubermensch” complex.
I mean, he actually planned this out, did research on where his target would be and even managed to get what appears to be a 3D printed gun. He managed to escape the scene and get to Central Park where there weren’t many cameras and then get to the Port Authority to catch a bus out of town. ALL of this done by end of the day on Wednesday before there were any pictures of him out there. That should have made him pretty much untraceable.
IF he had been as smart as he thought he was, he would have gone to the airport after ditching the gun and headed far, far away. TSA wouldn’t have been watching for him since there weren’t any pitcures yet and no one knew his name until today. He appears to have had a US passport on him so he could have gone anywhere. Instead he ends up in Altoona, PA where he is caught 5 days later.
Sounds like he managed to plan the crime but for some reason didn’t bother to plan an escape.
That actually sounds much more plausible than the “flirting” theory. Someone about to commit a planned murder is not likely to be in a flirting mood, except in the movies.
It is real hard nowadays to fly under an assumed name. He’d be far more likely to have screwed himself at an airport than in Altoona. He’d have to fly to someplace where he could disappear electronically for good. Which is to say some foreign country. And they’d have to be willing to take in an American indefinitely. Not likely.