AFP

Before he was accused of wreaking terror and chaos on a US Independence Day parade, the Highland Park community knew Robert Crimo as a quiet kid and former Cub Scout.

But online, the 21-year-old known to friends and family as Bobby showed a strong inclination for violence and anger at being overlooked.

“I know him as somebody who was a Cub Scout when I was the Cub Scout leader,” Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering told NBC on Tuesday, describing Crimo as “just a little boy.”

“It is one of those things where you step back and you say, ‘What happened?'”

Crimo, who grew up in Highland Park, lived in an apartment behind his father’s house. His dad, Bob Crimo, owned a local deli and had run against Rotering for mayor in 2019.

Crimo’s uncle, Paul Crimo, described his nephew as a “lonely, quiet person” to CNN.

“There were no signs that I saw would make him do this.”

But Paul Crimo also admitted he didn’t enjoy interacting with his nephew.

“I associate with him, but I don’t really like to engage with him,” he said.

– Dark online persona –

Despite the perception that Crimo was just an introverted young man, his online persona offered troubling signs.

A thin white man with a patchy beard, Crimo also has several tattoos on his neck and face, including one above his left eyebrow of the word “Awake,” a reference to his stage name.

Crimo bills himself as a musician, and goes by the online moniker “Awake the Rapper.” 

He posted his songs and music videos on Spotify and YouTube and had a modest following.

But in one video, computer drawn images show a figure in tactical gear shooting a rifle at a kneeling person begging for mercy.

Another video is of Crimo in a classroom, wearing a helmet and vest and standing next to an American flag as he threw bullets on the floor.

The voiceover on that video says, “I need to just do it. It is my destiny.”

In another clip, Crimo says, “I hate when others get more attention than me on the internet.”

The videos and songs have now been removed from YouTube and Spotify.

Crimo’s social media pages have also been taken down, but archived photos from his accounts appear to show him at a rally for then-president Donald Trump.

In another, Crimo appears to have a Trump flag draped around his shoulders.

Crimo “seems to have intended violence for a long time, even illustrating it” in his videos, said Emerson Brooking, a research fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank specializing in extremist internet and social media usage.

But even with the apparent pro-Trump images, “so far it does *not* appear that he was partisan or ideological,” Brooking said on Twitter, drawing a distinction between the mass shooters in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas.

Fighting raged on Tuesday in and around Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region as Russian troops tried to maintain a series of battlefield gains, while NATO pressed ahead with Finland and Sweden’s momentous membership bids.

Moscow’s forces — buoyed by seizing several cities in the Donbas in recent weeks — continued to press west, pounding their next key target, the city of Sloviansk, with “massive” shelling, the city’s mayor said. 

At least two people were killed and seven others wounded in Russian strikes targeting its central market, following several days of similarly deadly bombing there.

AFP journalists on the ground saw rockets hit the marketplace and several adjacent streets, as firefighters scrambled to put out resulting fires in the city, which had a pre-war population of around 100,000.

Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region, which includes Sloviansk, accused Russia of “intentionally targeting places where civilians assemble”.

“This is terrorism pure and simple,” he said on Telegram.

In Moscow, the defence ministry reported that Russian forces had also targeted the northeastern city of Kharkiv with “high-precision” weapons over the past 24 hours, claiming to have killed up to 150 Ukrainian servicemen.

Several other regions were also hit with missiles and artillery, Kyiv reported.

Meanwhile, Russia said it was investigating the torture of Russian soldiers held prisoner in Ukraine that were recently released as part of a prisoner swap. 

– ‘Timely’ –

In Brussels, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and the foreign ministers of Sweden and Finland hailed Tuesday as “historic”, after they kicked off accession procedures for the two countries that will expand the military alliance to 32 members.

“The membership of both Finland and Sweden will not only contribute to our own security but to the collective security of the alliance,” said Finland’s Pekka Haavisto, after protocols were signed launching the required ratification process.

Sweden and Finland both announced their intention to drop decades of military non-alignment and become part of NATO in the wake of Russia invading Ukraine in February.

Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov welcomed Tuesday’s “timely (and) correct” step, adding on Twitter: “Who will be next…?”

NATO offered Ukraine a path towards membership in 2008 but that stalled amid strong Russian opposition and has been further complicated by its invasion.

With the war well into its fifth month, Kyiv’s allies meeting in the Swiss city of Lugano committed Tuesday to supporting Ukraine through what is likely to be a lengthy and expensive eventual recovery. 

Two days of talks involving representatives from some 40 countries agreed on the need for reforms to boost transparency and tackle corruption, as they heard rebuilding the war-ravaged country could cost at least $750 billion.

“Our work prepares for the time after the war even as the war is still raging,” said Swiss President and co-host Ignazio Cassis.

– ‘Full alert’ –

After abandoning its initial war aim of capturing Kyiv following tough Ukrainian resistance, Russia has since focused its efforts on securing control of the Donbas.

The region is mainly comprised of Lugansk, which Russian forces have almost entirely captured, and Donetsk to its southwest, which they are now concentrating on seizing in full.

In a sign Moscow was trying to consolidate supply lines for its ongoing push, Ukraine’s armed forces said Russian troops in Lugansk were “taking measures” to restore transport infrastructure behind the fighting lines.

The fall of Lysychansk on Sunday, a week after the Ukrainian army also retreated from the neighbouring city of Severodonetsk, has freed them up to advance on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in Donetsk.

On Tuesday, they were first closing in on the smaller city of Siversk — which lies between Lysychansk and Sloviansk — after days of shelling there.

Two Ukrainian Red Cross minibuses were heading there to evacuate willing civilians, according to AFP reporters.

To the southwest, in the Moscow-occupied Kherson region, Russia’s troops were deploying helicopters and various artillery to try to stem Ukrainian counter-attacks.

The intensifying battles there come as Kremlin-installed authorities in Kherson announced that an official from Russia’s powerful FSB security services had taken over control of the regional government there. 

Kherson city, which lies close to Moscow-annexed Crimea, was the first major city to fall to Russian forces in February, and has seen a campaign of so-called Russification since. 

A spokesman for Ukraine’s defence ministry said Tuesday Russian forces outside the Donbas were “trying to bind our troops in order to prevent them from moving to the battle areas”. 

“It keeps us… on full alert all along the front line,” he told the Ukrinform news agency.

Meanwhile, appearing by video Tuesday at an annual forum hosted by The Economist magazine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky predicted Russian ally Belarus would not be drawn into the war.

But he warned “provocations” by its northern neighbour were likely to continue.

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko on Saturday accused Ukrainian forces of firing missiles at his country.

The three largest drug distributors in the United States have won a major court victory, with a judge ruling that they were not responsible for record opioid addiction in one part of West Virginia state.

About 10 percent of Cabell County’s population is or has been addicted to opioids — at a huge economic and social cost, acknowledged Judge David Faber.

But “while there is a natural tendency to assign blame in such cases, they must be decided not based on sympathy, but on the facts and the law,” he wrote in a decision released Monday night.

The “plaintiffs failed to show that the volume of prescription opioids distributed in Cabell/Huntington was because of unreasonable conduct” by defendants AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson, Faber wrote.

Tasked with supplying pharmacies, the three firms delivered more than 51 million doses of pain medication in the county between 2006 and 2014, and local authorities accused them of turning a blind eye to suspicious order volumes.

But “there is nothing unreasonable about distributing controlled substances to fulfill legally written prescriptions,” Faber said.

He put the blame on manufacturers who “aggressively market prescription opioids,” rather than the companies that distributed them.

After becoming addicted to pain pills, many people increased their consumption and eventually turned to illicit drugs such as heroin and fentanyl, an extremely powerful synthetic opioid.

The opioid crisis, which has caused more than 500,000 deaths over 20 years in the United States, has triggered a flurry of lawsuits from victims as well as cities, counties and states impacted by the fallout.

The suit filed by Cabell County and the city of Huntington had become a symbol of authorities’ efforts to make companies pay for the social and economic cost of the crisis.

Between May 3 and July 28, 2021, 70 witnesses testified as part of the lawsuit in federal court in Charleston, West Virginia.

While the hearings were still ongoing, the three distributors and pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay $26 billion to end a series of legal actions in a settlement that is still being finalized.

Ford reported higher US auto sales Tuesday, bucking an industry-wide trend of declines in the latest quarter amid crimped supply of semiconductor and other key parts.

The Michigan giant delivered 483,688 vehicles, up two percent from the year-ago level.

While citing a continuation of supply constraints that have dogged the industry over the last year, Ford described vehicle demand as “strong.” 

Ford’s sales were dominated by larger vehicles, including pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles. The burden of limited inventories has been cushioned by strong pricing.

“Amid industry-wide supply constraints, Ford outperformed the industry driven by strong F-Series, Explorer and new Expedition and Navigator SUV sales,” said Andrew Frick, a vice president in sales and distribution at Ford Blue’s, the company’s division focused on internal combustion vehicles.

The results included the first deliveries of the new F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck, which added 2,296 units to the total.

Ford’s sales figures came as rivals General Motors, Toyota and FCA (Stellantis) all reported quarterly sales drops of at least 15 percent amid supply chain problems.

A wealthy Chicago suburb was reeling Tuesday from a devastating shooting that saw gunfire tear through a July 4 holiday crowd, as online posts and videos pointed to the troubled mind of the 21-year-old suspected gunman.

Robert “Bobby” Crimo III, who grew up in Highland Park, where the shooting occurred, was arrested on Monday after six people were killed and two dozen injured during an Independence Day parade.

Crimo was taken into custody after law enforcement launched a  massive manhunt for the gunman who sprayed paradegoers with dozens of semi-automatic rounds from a rooftop, turning the celebration into a scene of death and trauma.

“We’re all still reeling,” Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering told NBC’s Today show on Tuesday.

“Unbelievable shock,” Rotering said. “Everybody knows somebody who was affected by this directly.”

Rotering said she personally knew the suspected gunman when he was a young boy in the Cub Scouts and she was a Cub Scout leader.

“How did somebody become this angry, this hateful to then take it out on innocent people who literally were just having a family day out?” Rotering asked.

David Baum, a doctor whose two-year-old was in the parade, witnessed the shooting and helped treat some of the injured.

“The people who were gone were blown up by that gunfire,” Baum told CNN. “The horrific scene of some of the bodies is unspeakable for the average person.”

On Tuesday, police and FBI agents looking for evidence were sifting through belongings left behind by members of the crowd as they fled.

Strollers, bicycles, folding chairs and other items littered the parade route through the main street of Highland Park as American flags flapped in the breeze from brick buildings.

– Disturbing online content –

Crimo, whose father unsuccessfully ran for mayor and owns a store in Highland Park called Bob’s Pantry and Deli, was an amateur musician billing himself as “Awake the Rapper.”

The younger Crimo’s online postings include violent content that alluded to guns and shootings.

One YouTube video posted eight months ago featured cartoons of a gunman and people being shot.

A voice-over says “I need to just do it.”

It adds: “It is my destiny. Everything has led up to this. Nothing can stop me, not even myself.”

Crimo, who has the word “Awake” tattooed over an eyebrow, is seen sporting an “FBI” baseball cap in numerous photos and is wearing a Trump flag as a cape in one picture.

Rotering, the mayor, said the firearm used in the shooting was “legally obtained.”

“This nation needs to have a conversation about these weekly events involving the murder of dozens of people with legally obtained guns,” she said. “We need to re-examine the laws.”

The shooting is the latest in a wave of gun violence plaguing the United States, where approximately 40,000 deaths a year are caused by firearms, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The deeply divisive debate over gun control was reignited by two massacres in May that saw 10 Black people gunned down at an upstate New York supermarket and 21 people, mostly young children, slain at an elementary school in Texas.

The Highland Park shooting cast a pall over Independence Day, when towns and cities across the country hold similar parades and people attend barbecues, sporting events and fireworks displays.

In another July 4 shooting, two police officers were wounded when they came under fire during a fireworks show in Philadelphia, local officials said.

– ‘Pop, pop, pop’ –

In Highland Park, Emily Prazak, who marched in the parade, described the mayhem.

“We were getting ready to march down the street and then all the sudden waves of these people started… like running towards us. And right before that happened, we heard the pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, and I thought it was fireworks,” Prazak told AFP.

Don Johnson said he initially thought it was a car backfiring.

“And finally, I heard the screams from a block down and people running and carrying their kids and everything, and we ran into the gas station, and we were in there for three hours,” Johnson told AFP.

“I’ve seen scenes like this over and over again on the TV and in different communities, and didn’t think it was going to happen here ever,” he said.

Five of the six people killed, all adults, died at the scene. The sixth was taken to the hospital but succumbed to wounds there.

Highland Park Hospital, where most of the victims were taken, said it had received 25 people with gunshot wounds aged eight to 85.

President Joe Biden voiced his shock and vowed to keep fighting “the epidemic of gun violence.”

“I’m not going to give up,” he said.

Last week, Biden signed the first significant federal bill on gun safety in decades, just days after the Supreme Court ruled that Americans have a fundamental right to carry a handgun in public.