On August 31, 2019, a spree shooting occurred in the West Texas cities of Midland and Odessa, involving a gunman shooting multiple people from a vehicle. Eight people were killed, including the perpetrator, and twenty-five people were injured, including three police officers. It was the third major mass shooting to take place in the United States in August 2019, following the El Paso Walmart shooting and the Dayton shooting (both of which took place 13 hours apart).
Authorities identified the shooter as 36-year-old Seth Aaron Ator from Lorena, Texas, a man who had been fired from his job the morning of the shooting spree. He was later shot and killed by police outside a movie theater in Odessa.
Shootings
The shooting spree began at 3:17 p.m. during a traffic stop on Interstate 20, where a Texas state trooper was shot while attempting to stop a gold 1999 Toyota Camry over a failure to signal a left turn. The suspect continued into Odessa, Texas, and shot another person on the Interstate. In Odessa, he abandoned the Toyota, hijacked a United States Postal Service-labeled Ram C/V Tradesman, killed a 29-year-old letter carrier and continued to drive and shoot people before police cornered and killed him in the parking lot of a Cinergy movie theater.
There was initial confusion over where the perpetrator was and how many individuals were involved. The confusion is apparent over the police scanner where one officer states about twenty minutes after the first officer was shot; "We're getting multiple calls for different victims in different locations. I've got people talking on four different channels, I'm not clear on anything, you're all talking."
Victims
Seven people, ranging in age from 15 to 57, were killed. Seventeen more were hospitalized for injuries. Among the injured were three police: a Texas state trooper, a Midland police officer, and an Odessa police officer. The youngest victim was a wounded 17-month-old child. One of the dead was a USPS postal worker, age 29, who had been driving the postal service truck Ator hijacked.
Perpetrator
The day after the shooting, police identified the shooter as 36-year-old Seth Aaron Ator of Lorena, Texas. Officials initially refused to identify Ator as they did not want to give him any notoriety. He grew up in Lorena, and attended McLennan Community College in Waco, Texas. He was arrested in Waco in 2001 for trespassing and evading arrest for trying to break into a woman's bedroom after threatening to kill her brother, which he pleaded guilty to in 2002.
Ator lived in West Odessa in Ector County in "a metal shack that lacked electricity, plumbing, a floor and even furniture"; he lived alone, except for a small dog. A neighbor said that, well before his killing spree, he had yelled at her while carrying a large rifle. She also said he sometimes shot animals from his roof, which she had complained to police about, but they never responded to her complaint. Another neighbor told the Associated Press that her family had lived near Ator for the past five months and were afraid of him due to his tendency to shoot rabbits in the nighttime and him banging on their door early one morning.
In January 2014, Ator failed a national criminal background check when he tried to purchase a gun; the system flagged him as ineligible because of a prior local court determination that he was mentally unfit. According to law enforcement officials, Ator subsequently bought the gun used in the shooting via a private sale, without having to go through a background check.
Investigation
On September 1, the FBI said it was executing a search warrant at the suspect's house, located about 20 minutes west of Odessa. On September 2, at a press conference, FBI agent Christopher Combs said that the perpetrator turned up for work "enraged". Ator was fired from his job at Journey Oilfield Services hours before the shooting. Fifteen minutes before his encounter with troopers, Ator phoned a national tip line. Agent Combs described the call as "rambling statements about some of the atrocities that he felt that he had gone through", adding "He did not make a threat during that phone call". FBI agents attempted to identify and locate the caller, but were unable to do so in the fifteen minutes before the shooting began. Police said Ator used an AR-15 type rifle in the shooting, but did not say where he obtained it.
On September 4, The Wall Street Journal and news station KCBD reported that the FBI and law enforcement in Lubbock served a search warrant to a person of interest, suspected of illegally manufacturing and selling the rifle in connection with the shooting.