The suspected Colorado gunman who went on a chaotic shooting rampage Monday was known to police before he killed five people in an apparently targeted spree: law enforcement had investigated him twice in the past year-and-a-half, for reasons that are still unclear.
Those probes never resulted in charges. Then, after gunning several people down across multiple locations in Denver and Lakewood, Lyndon James McLeod, 47, was killed by a Lakewood police officer, local authorities said.
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As of Tuesday night, that officer was still in an intensive care unit after McLeod allegedly shot her in the abdomen, according to KCNC-TV, a Denver CBS affiliate.
“She took a situation that was already horrendous… and stopped it from getting worse,” John Romero, a spokesman for Lakewood Police, said of the officer, according to KCNC-TV.
Any potential motives behind the gruesome attacks haven’t been publicly disclosed. But police have acknowledged that the suspected gunman was on their radar: officers investigated McLeod twice in the past year-and-a-half but those investigations never resulted in charges, according to the Washington Post.
Media outlets including The Daily Beast and KUSA, a Denver NBC affiliate, have reported that McLeod was the self-published author of the violent Sanction trilogy, which referenced the Unabomber and a shooting that took place in a tattoo parlor. One Amazon review for the first book in the series, posted in 2020, described it as an “800 page alt-right rant” that involved “fantasies of killing people involved in the BLM movement, and bizarre threats to Ben Shapiro/Sam Harris/and others.”
“Within 2.3 seconds, he trained the muzzle on the girl—her head and throat—as she cowered on the bed and screamed. He shot her twice,” McLeod reportedly wrote in the series’ second book, describing the fictional killing at a tattoo shop, according to KUSA.
“If she had been quiet he might not have shot her so quickly; but women are noisy—like kids —and for that they must pay a price,” he continued.
Among the dead Monday were Alicia Cardenas, a beloved Indigenous artist, tattoo shop owner and mother to a 12-year-old child, as well as Alyssa Gunn-Maldonado, a yoga instructor and doula. Danny Scofield, a tattoo artist at a separate shop in Lakewood, was killed at his workplace. He was a father of three, according to KDVR. Gunn-Maldonado’s husband, Jimmy Maldonado, who is a piercer at the tattoo shop Cardenas owned, Sol Tribe Tattoo and Piercing, was also shot and remains in an intensive care unit, according to KDVR, a Fox affiliate in Denver.
Denver Police Department Commander Matt Clark said McLeod appeared to target specific people, though one of the victims, Sarah Steck, a Hyatt hotel clerk who died of her injuries Tuesday, was shot for unclear reasons, according to NBC News. The shooting began at Sol Tribe Tattoo in Denver around 5:30 p.m. before McLeod allegedly moved on to the residence of an unidentified man, whom he killed; the Lakewood tattoo shop; and the Hyatt hotel, according to the Denver Post.
Between the killings, McLeod also allegedly forced himself into a home and business and pursued its occupants, who were not harmed; exchanged gunfire with the cops and “disabled” their car before escaping; and encountered officers in a gunfight at yet another location, according to the Denver Post. Ultimately, he was shot by the officer Romero has since described as “heroic.”
“We are beyond proud of her actions,” Romero said, according to the Washington Post.
Others, though, are left to grieve the deaths of their loved ones. Cardenas’ friend described her as a “beacon of light for an enormous number of marginalized people,” according to ABC affiliate KMGH-TV, while Scofield’s ex-wife said he was “part of a really big community, in the tattoo community,” calling him a “beautiful soul.”
“It’s a shock to everybody,” Cardenas’ father, Alfredo Cardenas, told the station. “It was obviously senseless.”
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