A man in his thirties was arrested in Colorado on Tuesday after making particularly violent threats against the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught, as well as against other establishments, a announced the police.
Matthew Harris, a former lecturer in the philosophy department at UCLA, had messaged some university students and employees on Monday with links to a video titled
"UCLA Philosophy (Mass Shooting)"
as well as a 800-page manifesto containing racial slurs and threats.
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The UCLA police had immediately opened an investigation and found the trace of the author in Boulder, Colorado, whose authorities were notified on Monday evening.
When an intervention team arrived on Tuesday morning, the man,
“aged about 31”,
barricaded himself but ended up surrendering calmly to the police after negotiations, Boulder Police Chief Maris Herold told a news conference.
“In the manifesto (submitted by the suspect), we identified thousands of violent references, mentioning things like shootings, murders, shootings, bombs, a massacre in a schoolyard in Boulder
,” pointed out Maris Herold.
“The level of violence we saw in the manifesto was most alarming,”
insisted the police officer, specifying that Matthew Harris had tried to buy a gun in a neighboring county last November but that the armory gave it to him. had refused. She did not specify the reasons for this refusal.
According to the
Los Angeles Times
, messages sent to UCLA were also peppered with racial slurs aimed at Jews and Asians. Faced with these threats, UCLA announced that it was canceling all classes scheduled for Tuesday on its campus and instead organizing lessons via the internet for its approximately 44,500 students. In a statement released after the arrest of the suspect in Colorado, the university expressed
"its great relief"
and announced that classes would resume normally on Wednesday. According to the
Daily Bruin
, a newspaper published by UCLA students, Matthew Harris was placed on administrative leave last spring after being accused of sending a video containing pornographic content to a student. The university had opened an investigation into these accusations.
Shootings, especially in schools, shopping malls or places of worship, are a recurring evil in the United States that successive governments have been powerless to stem, in particular because of the provisions of the Constitution protecting the right of American citizens to hold a weapon.
Colorado has seen two of the worst mass shootings in American history.
In 1999, two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher at their Columbine high school.
And in 2012, a heavily armed man shot and killed 12 people at an Aurora movie theater during a screening.
In March 2021, a gunman killed ten people in a supermarket in Boulder, 50 km from Denver, the state capital.
Gun violence has increased since the start of the pandemic in the country.
They made over 44.
