The Odessa mass shooter threatened his neighbor with a rifle last month, but the police never responded after she reported the incident to them, according to breaking news via CNN.

According to the CNN report, the 36-year-old perpetrator, who shot and killed seven people and wounded 22 more on Saturday afternoon, was reported to law enforcement after he threatened his neighbor with a rifle when she left her trash in a nearby dumpster. The neighbor also told CNN that the man would occasionally shoot and kill animals at night on his property from a structure on top of his house and then retrieve the dead animals.

“We are learning more about the gunman in west Texas responsible for the latest mass shooting in America,” CNN Newsroom host Ana Cabrera reported. But, Cabrera noted, the police never followed up with the man about the neighbor’s complaint. “She tells us that she called the police after that incident last month, but claims they never showed up because the property’s location doesn’t show up on GPS. It’s hard to find. As far as a motive, that’s still unknown. The FBI special agent in charge warns we may never know.”

She then asked former Secret Service agent Jonathan Wacrow about the shooter’s past behavior leading up to the massacre: “What do you make of this?”

“All red flags. Everything that we have heard about this individual that’s been released, they’re all behavioral red flags,” Wacrow said. “What I think will happen is we will see this individual had violent tendencies for a long time. Just lashed out. There was some sort of trigger at the moment of the traffic stop that led him to transcend into the continuum of this problem.”

“We have to take a whole community approach,” Wacrow added. “The fact that a neighbor called the police on this one incident and they didn’t act, that has to be fully investigated. We say, we clearly see there was a leading indicator of the propensity for violence. We need to stop that before someone transcends into an act of mass shooting and it creates these horrific events.”

Congress is currently debating so-called red flag laws, that would empower law enforcement to confiscate weapons or otherwise impose restrictions on people who exhibit dangerous behavior.

Watch the video above, via CNN.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/2LfKnTY