Salt Lake Massacre: Utter Lack of Curiosity of Media and Law Enforcement Is 'Random' and 'Unexplained'

Once again a possible religiously-motivated mass murder is being played down by law enforcement and the press as a purely random, unexplained act.

If you blinked on Tuesday you would have missed the last sign of reports on the Bosnian man, Sulejman Talovic, who shot and killed five people and shot and wounded several at a Salt Lake City mall on Monday. Talovic himself was gunned down by police officers. A press conference from the Bosnian community in the area never happened. The press stories consistently refer to Talovic as a “boy,” although journalistic standards require that any male 18 or older is to be referred to as a “man.”

Right on cue, Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank said, “It appears to be very random. There was no sense to why he was doing what he was doing.” (“Police: Teen Shot Mall Victims at Random”). Burbank also said that the young man “had one thing in mind: ‘to kill a large number of people,’ and he likely would have killed more than five had an off-duty officer not confronted him, the police chief said Tuesday.”

The AP report on Tuesday (“Salt Lake City mall reopens 2 days after fatal shootings”) quoted the “boy’s” aunt, Ajka Omerovic, as saying, "We are Muslims, but we are not terrorists."

Salt Lake City FBI agent Patrick Kiernan “said the bureau had no reason to believe Sulejman Talovic, who was killed by police, was motivated by religious extremism or an act of terrorism.” “’It's just unexplainable,’ Kiernan said. ‘He was just walking around and shooting everybody he saw.’"

I would have thought that the police, especially the FBI, would have spent just a smidge more time trying to explain the “unexplainable,” or figure out the pattern behind this seemingly “random” shooting. According to the AP, the young man’s parents don’t speak English, and on Tuesday the ATF had not yet even figured out where Talovic had obtained one of his two guns. In short, it’s awfully early in an investigation in which 5 people were killed to be so certain that the killer's motive is beyond finding out.

I don’t assume that just because Tanovic and his family are Muslim, that his murder spree was inspired by jihadism. But I don’t like it when law enforcement, and the media, collude together long before they have the facts to back it up, to announce and reinforce that religious extremism can be ruled out as an explanation. If Chief Burbank knows that Tanovic “was just walking around and shooting everybody he saw," even a moderate level of professional curiosity would feel the need to ask, why? Just look at the resources Patrick Fitzgerald is willing to burn up on questions much less absorbing than this.

The press isn't interested, either, in spite of the obvious hook about a mass murder in a straight-laced American city with a reputation for being hyper-religious. You can Google this story and see how fast it died. Meanwhile, Fox News is on hour 257 of coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death.

There have been many of these cases, and the pattern of law enforcement explaining away a likely jihadist motive is consistent. Michelle Malkin did a roundup last summer, (“A random gallery of ‘lone’ shooters”) It’s interesting to see how often terrorism as a motive is “discounted,” or the act is explained by mental illness.

In this case, Tanovic and his family fled their Bosnian village in 1993, when Tanovic was only 4, and the family came to the US in 1998, nearly 10 years ago. It has already been suggested that the experiences of the Bosnian war explained the rampage. A friend of the family thought this was so, “especially the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys by Serb forces in the northeastern enclave of Srebrenica. The boy had been in Srebrenica about two years before the massacre occurred.”

Maybe that theory has some merit, but I have to wonder why a kid who’s been in the country for nine years suddenly decides that Salt Lake Mormons are a close enough match to the Serbian Orthodox guys who committed a massacre in a village two years after a four-year-old moves out.

I mean, come on. Look at all the evangelicals who won't vote for Mormon Mitt Romney because he's not even a real Christian! On the other hand, can a Muslim really tell the difference?

The worst thing about this kind of story is that if law enforcement chooses to conduct a half-hearted investigation, and the press drops it, it’s impossible to get any idea of what really happened.

I have trouble believing there is, or imagining why there would be, a law enforcement-media conspiracy to sweep domestic jihadist murders under the rug. But then why are these stories so predictable?