JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – Former Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Director Tom Hackney, who was working during the mass shooting at The Jacksonville Landing, said the racially motivated mass shooting sparked painful memories.
The attack came five years to the day of a deadly mass shooting when a gunman from Baltimore opened fire and killed two people and injured 11 others at a video game tournament at The Jacksonville Landing.
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A now grieving community searching for answers after the lives of a 19, 29, and 52-year-old were stolen when Ryan Palmeter walked into a Dollar General on Kings Road with an AR-15 style rifle and opened fire.
The recent tragedy triggered painful memories for Hackney, who was working with JSO when the 2018 shooting took place.
“It makes you sick to your stomach. You never get used to it, you never get used to the loss and the ability to just be affected by it,” Hackney said.
Sheriff T.K. Waters made it clear that this shooting was “racially motivated,” stating that Palmeter left behind a manifesto that expressed an “ideology of hate” toward the Black community.
“He hated Black people,” Waters said at a news conference after the shooting.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations is calling the incident a hate crime. Hackney says law enforcement’s next step is to see if the shooter is part of a larger organization.
Although Waters also said in the conference Palmeter is not believed to be a part of any organization, this investigation is early and still ongoing.
“These types of people tend to work together or group together their ideologies. The way that they think and the hate that they spew, it tends to draw them to each other. You want to see who he knows. You really want to be looking at the firearms that he used, where did he get those,” Hackney said. “That’s a big piece of what investigators locally and federally will be doing.”
Waters addressed the media Sunday at another news conference that brought more details to light about the timeline of events.
He said the shooter legally made two separate purchases earlier in the year for the two guns used in the shooting.