The identity of the Highland Park shooter, who on Monday killed seven people and wounded thirty at the Independence Day parade in that town north of Chicago, has especially impacted the mayor, Nancy Rotering, who years ago had to Robert E. Crimo III in the group of scouts that he directed. There was nothing to suspect, the councilor said, that a normal kid, like so many in the area -a rich, homogeneously white area-, would feed the rage and hatred necessary to get on the roof of a building and rifle in hand, with which fired 70 rounds, truncating the popular celebration of the great day of the United States, whose independence was celebrated for 246 years. “He was just a child,” Rotering reminded him on Tuesday in statements to CNN. Crimo, 21, and not 22 as reported the day before, was arrested eight hours after the July 4 massacre.

The same message comes from his relatives: a normal boy, if perhaps a little stuck in himself and glued to the computer screen, in front of which he spent hours and where he expressed himself through videos and raps on Spotify and YouTube. But the virtual manifestations of the rapper Bobby, as everyone calls him, a young white man, slim and adolescent-looking, with tattoos on his face and neck – one of them reads Awake (awake)—revealed a disquieting personality, when not lost. With an aesthetic between animation and videogames, his videos hinted at sinister events, such as the drawings that show him lying in a pool of blood and surrounded by police, staging his own death. Or in a classroom presided over by a huge American flag, in which the young man receives a kind of revelation in the form of flashes while strange signs, one might say runic, flutter across the screen. Or, finally, the representation of a shooting at a school, and even a beheading in one of his last publications. “We know that many of the videos that he posted really reflected the desire to commit murder,” said Rotering. YouTube closed its page on Monday night, but some of the videos were still visible on social networks the next day.

In an animated video, Crimo, whose stage name was Awake the Rapper (Wake up the rapper), rhymes about armies “walking in the dark” with a drawing of a man pointing a rifle, a body on the ground, and another figure with hands up. Another panel shows a stream of blood spurting from the shooter’s chest, surrounded by police cars. His arrest was more peaceful than his wild imagination: just a police chase in a car and a tackle of the young man on the ground by the agents, without putting up any resistance. She had abandoned the murder weapon and had disguised herself as a woman to flee from the place where she perpetrated the massacre, driving a Japanese utility vehicle owned by her mother in which another rifle was found.

Except for Highland Park, which in the last two decades had only experienced two murders and was until Monday one of the quietest towns in Illinois, the 15th mass shooting – the one with at least four fatalities – recorded this year in the US will leave of being news within hours, as a sadly common occurrence. Without apparent political motivations, although some sources present him as a follower of the most ultramontane Donald Trump, all today underline the signs of mental disorder that no one was able to see, for which he was able to legally buy the weapon (unlike the Buffalo killer, who also threatened to commit a massacre at his high school and with a mental history misplaced). According to police, Crimo planned the attack for weeks.

In the state with the sixth strictest gun control laws in the country —and the ninth lowest rate of licenses—, and in a locality that had also adopted supplemental enforcement laws in 2013, Crimo’s action is even more surprising, although Illinois it is surrounded by states where weapons are ubiquitous. In the midst of the national gun violence epidemic, as defined by the White House, the suburb of 30,000 people north of Chicago was an island of placidity and prosperity: median household income is $150,000 a year, twice the national average; the poverty ratio, of only 5%, compared to 11% of the State. With a prominent presence of the Jewish community, Highland Park will soon forget the rapper as the country heads for the next slaughter.

In the video shot in a classroom, in which he appears wearing a black bike helmet, Bobby prophesies: “I’m like a sleepwalker… I know what I have to do. Everything has led to this. Nothing can stop me, not even myself.”

Follow all the international information in Facebook y Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.