MEXICO CITY — The assailant who opened fire on tourists from a pyramid at one of Mexico’s signature archaeological sites — leaving a Canadian woman dead and 13 other foreign visitors injured, including 6 US. citizens — was a copycat who admired foreign school shooters and meticulously planned the attack, Mexican authorities said Tuesday.
“Everything indicates that this person had traits of psychological problems, and was influenced by episodes that have occurred” outside Mexico, said President Claudia Sheinbaum said at her morning news conference.
The shooter, identified as Julián César Jasso Ramírez, 27, shot himself dead at the scene as police and National Guard troops clambered up the steep steps of the Pyramid of the Moon to confront him shortly before mid-day Monday at the Teotihuacán archaeological park, 25 miles northeast of Mexico City.
The site is among the most visited touristic attractions in Mexico, hosting almost 2 million visitors last year.
A backpack found by the assailant’s body contained literature about other mass shootings, including the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado, authorities said.
Media reports here indicated that the killer was a far-right fanatic and admirer of Hitler. The attack occurred on April 20, which is both Hitler’s birthday and the anniversary of the Columbine school shooting.
The killer employed a single revolver — a .38 Special Smith and Wesson, dating from 1968, authorities said. He also carried a knife in his backpack. He took an Uber to the murder site and stayed in a nearby hotel, authorities said, and he had scouted the area and planned the attack for days.
Police and soldiers exchanged fire with the suspect in a dramatic scene at the pyramid, as he tried to escape and terrified tourists sought cover. He was shot once in the foot before he killed himself, authorities said
Mexican authorities described the incident as a one-off that should not scare off visitors in a nation where tourism is vital to the economy, but vowed to bolster security at archaeological sites, likely by installing metal detectors. Currently, visitors to most archaeological parks face little screening.
“This has never happened before,” Sheinbaum said.
Monday’s shooting fanned concern for Mexico’s vital tourist industry at a pivotal moment.
Starting in June, Mexico is due to host matches for the World Cup soccer tournament, a event that is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors from across the globe. Mexican authorities were quick to repeat earlier assertions that a strict regimen was in place to protect to the matches.
“We are convinced that the security of the World Cup is guaranteed,” Mexico’s federal security chief, Omar García Harfuch, told reporters.
Six victims remained hospitalized on Tuesday, authorities said. The injured included both visitors with gunshot wounds and others who injured themselves while trying to escape the gunman on the 140-foot-high pyramid.
The one fatality was a Canadian woman. Six U.S. citizens were among the injured.
All of those injured were foreigners, authorities said. It was unclear whether the shooter targeted foreign visitors deliberately.
Mexico has a much higher homicide rate than the United States and frequently experiences mass violence, often in the context of organized crime.
But Mexico has not traditionally been the site of what experts define as “public mass killings,” like what occurred at Columbine High School in 1999, where shooters fired at random in an effort to gain notoriety.
And, experts say, foreigners are seldom targeted in Mexico’s frequent spasms of violence, much of which is linked to cartel warfare, drug smuggling and other rackets, including extortion.
Experts in violence say the largest percentage of such shootings globally occur inside the U.S. but are on the rise in other developed countries, including a recent spate of school shootings in Western Europe.
Adam Lankford, a criminologist at the University of Alabama who has studied the global proliferation of mass shootings, said the internet gives broad access to online communities where mass shooters are idolized.
Lankford’s data show a rise in mass shootings globally, with many shootings influenced by killings in the U.S.
“Sometimes the United States has a product, like blue jeans, or McDonald’s, that becomes globalized and fashionable everywhere. It’s kind of a horrific idea but the same thing can happen with bad behaviors, and that’s what the data we collected has shown,” Lankford said.
He added that “attacking a national landmark fits the idea of a fame-seeking attack. Picking a symbolic target is a way to almost guarantee yourself more attention.”
Lankford said there is a pattern of attackers shooting from heights, citing a 1966 incident when a gunman opened fire from the University of Texas clock tower and the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas, where a gunman killed 60 people at a concert by firing from the 32nd floor of a hotel.
Special corresondent Liliana Nieto del Río contributed.
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