Who was the Farmington shooter? Here’s what we know so far
Police have released the identity of the Farmington, New Mexico shooter who killed three and injured at least six others as 18-year-old Beau Wilson, a student at Farmington High School who was set to graduate the day after the Monday shooting spree. Police fatally shot Wilson.
The victims who died from Wilson’s rampage include 97-year-old Gwendolyn Schofield, her 73-year-old daughter, Melody Ivie, and 79-year-old Shirley Voita.
In a Tuesday briefing, Farmington Deputy Police Chief Kyle Dowdy said the shooting in the residential area between Dustin and Ute streets appears “to be purely random and had no specific targets or motives that we can identify at this time.”
Dowdy said Wilson lived at an address in the neighborhood where the shootings took place. However, there was no indication he knew any of his victims.
A 16-year-old friend of the shooter told the Albuquerque Journal that during the shooting, he sent Wilson a Snapchat message about the shooting.
“The 16-year-old said he saw a video on TikTok of his friend being shot by officers. He said he knew instantly — by the way Wilson was walking — who it was,” the report noted.
The friend said, “I knew he was going to do something bad, but I didn’t think it was going to be something like that.”
“What he did was wrong,” the teenager said. “But everyone is going to see him as the mass shooter of Farmington, and I’m going to see him as Beau.”
As for a motive of the shooting, police said, “We’ve discovered nothing that leads us to believe that the suspect knew” and “We’re pretty confident in that this was completely random.”
Dowdy noted Wilson had a history of “minor infractions as a juvenile” and was believed to have suffered from an unspecified mental illness but nothing that “would rise on our radar.”