Online Trail Illuminates Nutty Racist Black Baton Rouge Gunman's Path to Violence

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/us/baton-rouge-shooting.html

BATON ROUGE, La. — He joined the Marines, served in Iraq and earned a Good
Conduct Medal. He was an entrepreneur, a self-published author, a
nutrition and fitness counselor, a proponent of the American gospel of
self improvement. He considered himself a lifestyle coach, even though he
had failed in marriage, neglected to pay his taxes and was, at one point,
living on $500 per month. He had also embarked on a spiritual quest to
find his roots as a person of color, traveling around Africa for two
years.

But Gavin Long’s life — a life that had seemed, in many ways, deeply, and
even typically, American — also became a web of paranoid ideas, a
professed allegiance to an antigovernment “sovereign citizen group” and a
belief that “bloodshed” was a better tool than peaceful protest in the
fight against oppression.

On Sunday, Mr. Long died on a commercial street here in a shootout with
the police. It was his 29th birthday. He killed three law enforcement
officers and wounded three others. On Monday, a State Police spokesman
said Mr. Long had been “targeting” officers, though his motives otherwise
remain murky.

Mr. Long had been a resident of Kansas City, Mo., and it is also unclear
what he was doing in Baton Rouge, though a video that appears to have been
posted by him shows him in the Louisiana capital discussing the July 5
fatal police shooting of a fellow African-American man, Alton B. Sterling.
In the video, Mr. Long also hawks one of his books and expounds on his
theories of life, success strategies and Afrocentric business practices.

Though the police here have released little information about Mr. Long, a
deeper portrait is beginning to emerge, based on a large trail left
online.

Many of these digital breadcrumbs — web posts, YouTube videos and podcasts
— are tied to Mr. Long’s given name, or some version of a new name, Cosmo
Ausar Setepenra, which he filed court documents in Missouri to adopt in
May 2015. (He never petitioned the court, so the name change was not
legally binding, officials said.) Some of these posts and videos included
biographical and personal information that aligned with the information
released by the authorities.

There is evidence that he sought to do the right thing, pursuing higher
education and serving his nation. There is also evidence of paranoid
thinking, and an interest in shedding blood to advance the cause of
oppressed peoples.

In an interview with a podcast host in March, Mr. Long identified himself
as a member of the online community of so-called targeted individuals,
people who believe they are being harassed with mind-control weapons and
by armies of stalkers.

And in one YouTube video, titled “Protesting, Oppression and How to Deal
With Bullies,” he discusses the killings of African-American men at the
hands of police officers, including the death of Mr. Sterling, and
advocates a bloody response instead of the protests that followed the
deaths.

“One hundred percent of revolutions, of victims fighting their
oppressors,” Mr. Long said, “have been successful through fighting back,
through bloodshed. Zero have been successful just over simply protesting.
It doesn’t — it has never worked, and it never will. You got to fight
back. That’s the only way that a bully knows to quit.”

“You’ve got to stand on your rights, just like George Washington did, just
like the other white rebels they celebrate and salute did,” he added.
“That’s what Nat Turner did. That’s what Malcolm did. You got to stand,
man. You got to sacrifice.”

At a news conference on Monday afternoon in Baton Rouge, local and state
officials detailed the shootings of the officers and the gunman and said
the attack had been well planned.

“There is no doubt whatsoever that these officers were intentionally
targeted and assassinated,” the superintendent of the Louisiana State
Police, Col. Michael D. Edmonson, said. Mr. Long carried two guns — an IWI
Tavor semiautomatic 5.56 caliber rifle, which is an Israeli assault gun,
and a 9-millimeter handgun, the colonel said, and had a second assault-
style rifle in the car.

The crime scene along Airline Highway had been dismantled, and business
was returning to normal. Bullet holes could be seen in an outside wall of
the Hair Crown Beauty Supply Store, where the shooting took place. The
city had begun the process of mourning the police officers Mr. Long gunned
down — including Montrell Jackson, 32, an African-American and 10-year
veteran of the Baton Rouge Police Department, who left behind a wife and
son.

On a podcast posted on iTunes and dated April, the speaker, who gave his
name as Cosmo, gives a sketch of his life story. He says he grew up in
Kansas City, and was a straight-A student until about middle school, when
he became fat and started getting C’s. As a child, he was something of a
hustler who made extra money by making loans and charging interest.

“Say if I loaned out money to my family, even to my mother, I would make
her pay me back, with interest,” he says. “If I loaned $20, I would make
you pay me back $5 on Friday.”

He says he lost significant weight in high school, bought his first car at
age 16 and joined the Marines.

Mr. Long’s military records show he served from 2005 to 2010, including a
six-month deployment in Iraq. He was a sergeant and a data network
specialist who earned several awards, including one for good conduct. He
was also assigned to Okinawa, Japan, and several locations in Southern
California.

He attended Central Texas College at its Marine Corps Air Station Miramar
site in San Diego, and via distance education, earning an associate of
arts degree.

In 2011, court records show, he had an uncontested divorce from a woman
named Aireyona Osha Hill. They listed that they had no children or assets
and that Mr. Long earned $500 a month.

By 2012, Mr. Long had moved — briefly, apparently — to Tuscaloosa, Ala.,
where he spent one semester at the University of Alabama. He majored in
business. He made the dean’s list. The University of Alabama police had no
interactions with him during his time there. Mike Mansur, a spokesman for
the Jackson County prosecutor’s office, which covers most of Kansas City,
said his office also had no record of contact with Mr. Long.

He also attended Clark Atlanta University during the 2012-13 school year,
and was in good academic standing, a university spokeswoman said. Although
he claimed to be on the dean’s list there, he said he had dropped out,
sold his two cars, gave away his possessions and traveled to Africa.

Mr. Long appeared to be obsessed with the idea of self-improvement, for
himself and for others, and he embraced more esoteric means of achieving
those goals. A website registered to Mr. Long identifies him as a “freedom
strategist, mental game coach, nutritionist, author and spiritual
adviser.” He posted regular podcasts and blog entries sharing his
philosophies about standing up for one’s rights.

While traveling to Burkina Faso, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda,
Tanzania, and Uganda, he said, he wrote three books, covering topics like
“holistic detoxification for health, well-being and success”; the “ancient
esoteric secrets of the Pineal Gland”; and the “124 Universal Laws and
their use in The Laws of The Cosmos.”

In 2015, Mr. Long filed the petition to change his name. In his statement
of intent, he said he was a member of an “indigenous society” called the
United Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah Mu’ur Nation. It was apparently a
reference to the Empire Washitaw De Dugdahmoundyah. On its website, the
group says it is “a multicultural, highly spiritual nation of aboriginal,
indigenous Americans” who accept both “lineal and nonlineal” members.

Ryan Lenz, a senior writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which
tracks extremist groups, said the group was largely African-American and
subscribed to a “sovereign citizen” ideology that holds that members are
“no longer beholden to any form of government.”

On Monday morning, a man who answered a phone number on the website and
said he was a leader of the group, Fredrix Joe Washington, said he had
never heard of Mr. Long.

“You have to understand that this is, Washitaw is a family, a close-knit
gathered group,” said Mr. Washington, 71. “And we are about peace — and
especially not about going out and killing some police officers. That is
nothing but a devil.”

This year, court records show, a case was filed against Mr. Long for not
paying his local earnings tax. Papers in that case were served on his
address last month, and his mother accepted them, according to court
records. Six days later, the tax case was dismissed.

In many of his podcasts, Mr. Long expounds at length on dating and self-
improvement tips for men, arguing that they must display the
characteristics of an “alpha” male. But a number of his other online
offerings discuss the historical oppression of minorities, and America’s
current racial problems.

In a recent email he sent out to those interested in his ideas, he listed
numerous instances of massacres of African-American people. And he offered
a suggestion for those who encounter ideas similar to the one proposed by
the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, which
would temporarily ban Muslims from the country.

“Whatever new speech/scheme the mainstream news starts promoting, you go
along with it (but with your spiritual eye open). Dont fight it, go with
the ocean! If co-workers at your job start telling you we need to ban
Islam, then agree!,” he wrote.


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