The following article by Brandy Zadrozny and Ben Collins was posted on the Daily Beast website December 15, 2017:
For years before William Edward Atchison killed two students and himself, he lived a shadow life online—one full of crude alt-right memes and praise for school shooters.
In real life, William Edward Atchison—people called him Bill—lived in a little yellow house with his parents, about a mile away from the Giant gas station where he worked and from Aztec High School, where he shot and killed two students and then himself last Thursday.
At the murder scene, police found a thumb drive with a note that read, “If things go according to plan, today would be when I die. I go somewhere and gear up, then hold a class hostage and go apeshit, then blow my brains out.”
He wrote “work sucks, school sucks, life sucks. I just want out of this shit.”
“It’s a shame he wasn’t on our radar,” San Juan County Sheriff Ken Christesen told Fox Newslast week. “I don’t think he had anything so much as a traffic ticket.”
And yet online, the 21-year-old New Mexico resident lived a prolific life as a white supremacist, pro-Trump meme peddler who was most known for his obsession with school shooters. For a half-decade, Atchison spent most of his days online, repeatedly posting threats of violence and cries for help.
When users saw posts from Atchison, who went by dozens of names like “Adam Lanza” and “Future Mass Shooter” on both larger platforms like YouTube and racist communities like The Daily Stormer, they would often ask how his manifesto was going.
Despite local law enforcement’s claims that he wasn’t a known threat, and a visit from the FBI in 2016, Atchison spent most of the last half-decade glorifying school shooters on alt-right websites and posting plaintive appeals for help in fixing his life, according to hundreds of posts analyzed by The Daily Beast.
View the post here.