By Brad Brooks and Steve Gorman
(Reuters) -The man who shot dead two firefighters and wounded a third after setting a blaze near a popular mountainside trail in Idaho was described by authorities on Monday as a young transient whose motives remained a mystery a day after the attack.
Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris identified the suspected gunman in Sunday’s attack as Wess Roley, 20, who was found dead at the scene of an apparent self-inflicted gun wound.
Authorities have not identified the two firefighters who were shot and killed, nor have they given the name of a third firefighter who was shot and survived.
Roley had some sort of interaction with the firefighters he shot and killed when they arrived on the scene of the fire, Norris said, though he provided no details on what occurred. The suspect was known to have expressed interest in becoming a firefighter himself, the sheriff said.
Norris said that Roley, who was born in California, had been living for the past year in Coeur d’Alene, about 260 miles (420 km) east of Seattle, where the shooting took place at Canfield Mountain, a nature area popular with hikers and bikers. Over 300 law enforcement officers responded to the scene on Sunday. Early reports indicated there were multiple shooters attacking firefighters.
But Norris on Monday said it appeared that Roley acted alone and that he had no known connection to any sort of group that may have motivated the violence.
The sheriff said that Roley had no known criminal record. Local police had five recent minor and non-violent interactions with Roley, who appeared to be living out of his vehicle and whom officers during those interactions had told to move from spots where he was parked and residing.
On Sunday, Norris said they believed Roley was armed with at least one rifle. But on Monday he said that the weapon recovered near Roley’s body at the crime scene was a shotgun.
“We know that some rifled slugs were used, and a rifled slug is a pretty big projectile,” Norris said, adding that investigators were still trying to determine if other weapons were involved.
When firefighters responded to the blaze on Sunday afternoon, they came under fire almost immediately, Norris said. When police officers and sheriff’s deputies arrived later, they, too, came under fire from trees that Roley had apparently climbed and shot from.
Scores of officers from the city, county, state and federal level responded, including two helicopters with snipers aboard. The suspect was located using cellphone information and his body was removed by a SWAT team as the fire approached.
Gun ownership is widespread in the U.S., where the Constitution protects the rights of Americans to “keep and bear arms.”
Deaths related to gun violence are common – 17,927 people were murdered with a gun in 2023 in the U.S., according to the most recent available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)
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