The mother of a young man suspected of gunning down 22 people at a Walmart in the US state of Texas called police weeks before, concerned about a military-style weapon he owned, the family's lawyers told CNN.
The report comes with bipartisan sentiment for action on gun safety appearing to grow after the killings in El Paso and another mass shooting hours later in Dayton, Ohio that left nine people dead.
CNN reported that the mother of the El Paso suspect, Patrick Crusius, had called police in the Dallas suburb of Allen weeks before the attack because she was concerned about his owning an "AK"-type firearm, the network quoted family lawyers as saying.
AK usually refers to a Kalashnikov, a type of semi-automatic rifle.
The lawyers, Chris Ayres and R. Jack Ayres, of Dallas, told CNN that Crusius's mother was worried given her son's age, maturity level and lack of experience with such a weapon.
They added that, during the call, a police officer told her that -- based on what she described -- her 21-year-old son was legally able to purchase the weapon.
But the mother's call was "informational" and not motivated out of a concern that her son posed a threat, the lawyers said, adding the mother did not give police her name or her son's name.
"This was not a volatile, explosive, erratic behaving kid," CNN quoted Chris Ayres as saying. "It's not like alarm bells were going off."
Chris Ayres could not immediately be reached when AFP contacted his law office.
Asked about the CNN report, Sergeant Jon Felty, of the Allen Police Department, told AFP: "I have nothing in our database to support this claim."
About 20 minutes before the rampage with a semi-automatic weapon, Crusius, who is white, posted a four-page white supremacist "manifesto" on the online forum 8chan that railed against Hispanics.
Several of those killed were Mexicans.
After the shootings, US President Donald Trump faced protests that his rhetoric on race has fuelled extremism.
In an address to the nation on Monday, Trump rejected racism and white supremacist ideology, and said he supported "red flag" laws allowing authorities to confiscate weapons from people believed to present grave risks.
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One was fueled by racist hatred of immigrants and warned of a "Hispanic invasion." The other's motives are less clear but he apparently resented women and compiled a "hit list" of girls in high school.
Police and the FBI were trying to piece together on Tuesday what drove two young American men to commit unspeakable acts of carnage over the weekend.
Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old unemployed white man from the Dallas suburb of Allen, opened fire with a semi-automatic weapon at a Walmart on Saturday in El Paso, Texas.
About 20 minutes before the rampage, which left 22 people dead, he posted a four-page white supremacist "manifesto" on the online forum 8chan that railed against Hispanics.
In the document titled "The Inconvenient Truth," Crusius wrote that the attack "is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas."
Crusius claimed he was "defending" the US "from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion" and made references to the Christchurch shootings in New Zealand, where a white gunman killed 51 worshippers at two mosques in March.
El Paso police chief Greg Allen said Crusius has not shown any remorse since his arrest and "appears to be in a state of shock and confusion."
According to court documents, Crusius has been unemployed for the past five months and living with his grandparents.
In a statement, his grandparents said he had lived with them while attending classes at Collin County College but moved out of their home about six weeks ago.
According to CNN, a Twitter account linked to Crusius frequently shared tweets by President Donald Trump including one with Trump's name spelled out with guns.
In a LinkedIn profile, Crusius wrote, "I'm not really motivated to do anything more than what's necessary to get by.
"Working in general sucks, but i guess a career in Software Development suits me well. I spend about 8 hours every day on the computer so that counts towards technology experience I guess."
El Paso is about a nine-hour drive from the Dallas area and Crusius appears to have deliberately selected the city because of its heavily Hispanic population.
El Paso lies on the Rio Grande River which marks the US border with Mexico, and has a population of 680,000, of which 83 percent are of Hispanic descent.
- 'An oddball' -
The motivations of the other gunman, Connor Betts, 24, are less clear but several former friends told US media that he had a history of disturbing behavior, particularly towards women.
Also armed with a semi-automatic weapon, Betts killed nine people including his sister, 22-year-old Megan Betts, in Dayton, Ohio, early Sunday morning. He was shot dead by police within a minute.
Investigators have found no evidence so far to indicate that the shooting was motivated by racial hatred.
"Just based on where we're at now we are not seeing any indication of race being a motive," Dayton police chief Richard Biehl said.
Betts was white and six of his nine victims were black.
Mika Carpenter, 24, who has known Betts since she was 13 years old, told The New York Times "he was kind of hateful to women because they didn't want to date him."
The Dayton Daily News reported that Betts had been suspended from Bellbrook High School for drawing up a "hit list" of girls.
According to Buzzfeed News, Betts was a member of a "pornogrind" heavy metal band called Menstrual Munchies which performed songs with themes of sexual violence.
Demoy Howell, a friend of Betts, told the Dayton Daily News that Betts was "always a bit of an oddball."
"He had a dark sense of humor -- jokes about people dying," Howell told the newspaper. "He would wear all black. I remember sensing a dark energy around him.
"I think this is less of a hate crime and more of an 'I hate everybody' crime," Howell said.
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EL PASO, Texas - Two more victims of a shooting rampage at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, died of their wounds on Monday, police said, raising the death toll to 22 in the massacre as U.S. President Donald Trump planned a visit to the stricken community.
The latest fatalities bring to 31 the number of people killed during the weekend in mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, that have touched off a new furor over gun violence in the United States.
Patrick Crusius, 21, has been charged with a single count of capital murder in the El Paso case, court documents show, in what is likely a legal place holder to keep him in custody while the investigation is under way.
Authorities have cited a lengthy anti-immigrant manifesto, apparently posted online by the suspect before the Saturday morning shooting in the heavily Hispanic border city, which they said was evidence the bloodshed was racially motivated.
Eight of those killed in the attack were Mexican citizens, according to the Mexican government.
The four-page statement uploaded to 8chan, a largely un-moderated online message board often used by extremists, called the Walmart attack "a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas."
It also expressed support for a gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.
The El Paso killings prompted 8chan founder Frederick Brennan, in an interview with the New York Times, to call for the site to be shut down. Brennan no longer has control of 8chan, which is now run from the Philippines by a U.S. Army veteran, the Times reported.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Saturday's rampage appeared to be a hate crime and federal prosecutors called it domestic terrorism. A Texas prosecutor said the state will seek the death penalty against Crusius if he is convicted.
Trump said Americans "must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy" and blamed the internet and violent video games for fostering violence.
TRUMP TO VISIT WEDNESDAY
El Paso Mayor Dee Margo told reporters at an afternoon news conference that Trump would visit the city on Wednesday. The Democratic mayor asked that the visit by the Republican president amid a divisive gun control debate not be politicized.
U.S. gun control activists say the internet and video games cannot be blamed because they are also are popular in countries where mass shootings are virtually unknown, in part because it is harder to obtain a firearm.
It was unclear if Crusius had retained a lawyer or would make an initial court appearance. El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said the suspect was cooperating with investigators.
The suspect's grandparents said in a statement read to reporters by a family outside their home in the Dallas suburb of Allen, 650 miles (1,046 km) east of El Paso, that they were devastated by the attack.
"He lived with us in our house in Allen, Texas, while he attended Collin College," they said. "He moved out of our house six weeks ago and has spent a few nights here while we were out of town."
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a congressional panel on July 23 that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the preceding nine months and that most investigations of that kind involve some form of white supremacy.
The Texas rampage was followed just 13 hours later by the mass shooting in Ohio and came a week after a man shot dead three people at a California garlic festival before taking his own life.
In Dayton, Ohio, a gunman in body armor and a mask killed nine people in less than a minute and wounded 27 others in the downtown historic district before he was shot dead by police.
Police said the El Paso suspect opened fire with a rifle on Walmart shoppers, many of them bargain-hunting for back-to-school supplies, then surrendered to officers who confronted him outside the store.
In El Paso, residents on Monday brought crosses representing each of the victims to a growing memorial site near the store.
El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, together with the neighboring city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, form a metropolitan border area of some 2.5 million residents constituting the largest bilingual, bi-national population in North America.
Trump has derided asylum seekers and other immigrants coming across the U.S. southern border as liars and criminals, prompting Democrats to accuse him of racism.
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EL PASO, Texas - A single capital murder charge was filed on Sunday against the man accused of killing 20 people and wounding more than two dozen others at a Walmart store in El Paso, a mass shooting authorities are viewing as a case of domestic terrorism.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott said Saturday's rampage in the heavily Hispanic city appeared to be a hate crime. Police cited an anti-immigrant screed posted online shortly before the shooting, which they attributed to the suspect, Patrick Crusius, as evidence that the bloodshed was racially motivated.
It was the second of three separate public shooting sprees carried out in the United States in the span of a week, an unusually dense cluster of massacres that prompted fresh alarm in a country accustomed to reports of young men shooting down strangers.
The County of El Paso's state court website lists a single charge of capital murder against Crusius, a 21-year-old white man from Allen, Texas.
His grandparents, with whom Crusius had recently been living, said they were devastated by the attack.
"He lived with us in our house in Allen, Texas, while he attended Collin College," the statement said, read aloud by a family friend to reporters outside the home on Sunday. "He moved out of our house six weeks ago, and has spent a few nights here while we were out of town."
The single charge is likely a legal place holder to keep Crusius in custody until further charges can be filed against him for each of the dead and the wounded.
It was unclear if Crusius has a lawyer or when a bond hearing or other court appearances will occur.
A state prosecutor said prosecutors will seek the death penalty against Crusius if he is found guilty.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said in a statement on Sunday the attack "underscores the continued threat posed by domestic violent extremists and perpetrators of hate crimes."
The agency said it remains concerned that more US-based extremists could become inspired by these and previous high-profile attacks to engage in similar acts of violence.
The US attorney for the western district of Texas, John Bash, said federal authorities were treating the El Paso massacre as a case of domestic terrorism.
"And we're going to do what we do to terrorists in this country, which is to deliver swift and certain justice," he told a news conference on Sunday. He said the attack appeared "to be designed to intimidate a civilian population, to say the least."
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a congressional panel on July 23 that the bureau has recorded about 100 arrests of domestic terrorism suspects in the preceding nine months and that most investigations of that kind involve some form of white supremacy.
BACK-TO-BACK SHOOTINGS
The Texas rampage was followed just 13 hours later by another mass shooting, and came a week after a man shot dead three people at a California garlic festival before he was killed by police.
In Dayton, Ohio a gunman in body armor and a mask killed nine people in less than a minute and wounded 27 others in the city's downtown historic district before he was shot dead by police.
Democratic candidates for next year's presidential election called on Sunday for stricter gun laws and accused President Donald Trump of stoking racial tensions.
Trump has frequently derided many asylum seekers and other immigrants coming across the US southern border as liars and criminals. At a political rally he held in May, after asking the crowd what could be done about immigrants coming in illegally, Trump smiled and joked after someone in the crowd yelled back: "Shoot them!"
Responding to the shootings, Trump called on lawmakers to pass new background checks laws for buying guns, and suggested any such legislation might also include greater restrictions on immigration.
"We must have something good, if not GREAT, come out of these two tragic events!" he wrote on Twitter on Monday morning ahead of planned remarks on the subject. On Sunday, he attributed the shootings to what he called the "mental illness" of the killers.
SIGNS OF HATE
El Paso Police Chief Greg Allen said the suspect was cooperating with investigators.
"He basically didn't hold anything back," Allen said at Sunday's news conference, but declined to elaborate.
Police said the suspect opened fire with a rifle on shoppers, many of them bargain-hunting for back-to-school supplies, then surrendered to officers who confronted him outside the store.
A police spokesman said on Sunday that the names of the victims would be released only when relatives had been informed, and he said he had no estimate for how long that would take.
Crusius comes from Allen, Texas, a Dallas suburb some 650 miles (1,046 km) east of El Paso, which lies along the Rio Grande across the US-Mexico border from Ciudad Juarez.
A four-page statement posted on 8chan, an online message board often used by extremists, and believed to have been written by the suspect, called the Walmart attack "a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas."
It also expressed for support for the gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.
El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, together with the neighboring city of Las Cruces, New Mexico, form a metropolitan border area of some 2.5 million residents constituting the largest bilingual, bi-national population in North America.
The rampage in El Paso on Saturday was the eighth most deadly mass shooting in recent years in the United States.
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U.S. cyber security firm Cloudflare on Monday said the company will terminate online message board 8chan as its customer after a shooter used the messaging forum just before killing 20 people at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas on Saturday.
The shooter is believed to have posted a four-page statement on 8chan, and called the Walmart attack "a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas".
The suspect was officially identified as a 21-year-old white male from Allen, Texas, a Dallas suburb some 650 miles (1,046 km) east of El Paso, which lies along the Rio Grande, across the U.S.-Mexico border from Ciudad Juarez. Citing law enforcement officials, multiple news media reports named the suspect as Patrick Crusius.
The suspect's post on 8chan expressed support for the gunman who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.
"We just sent a notice that we are terminating 8chan as a customer effective at midnight tonight Pacific Time," Cloudflare Chief Executive Officer Matthew Prince said in a blog post.
"Based on evidence we've seen, it appears that he (gunman)posted a screed to the site immediately before beginning his terrifying attack on the El Paso Walmart killing 20 people," Prince said.
The CEO's blog added that while 8chan did not violate law by not moderating the "hate-filled" content posted by its users, it has "created an environment that revels in violating its spirit".
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