Allen, Texas, mall mass shooter identified as Mauricio Garcia, 33; carried assault-style rifle

The man who killed eight people and wounded seven others in a mass shooting at a mall in Allen, Texas, was identified Sunday by police — joining a seemingly endless list of killers intent on wreaking destruction and horrifying the nation.

Mauricio Garcia, 33, first opened fire outside the mall Saturday before continuing his rampage inside.

He’d been staying at a hotel in Dallas, investigators said. Garcia previously lived with his parents in the Metroplex, and authorities were spotted outside their home Saturday night and into Sunday.

The FBI confirmed its agents were working two separate scenes in the area.

The first moments of the massacre were captured on a car’s dashboard camera as it drove away from the horrifying scene.

The video shows a man stepping out of a gray Dodge Charger with a gun in his hands and immediately opening fire on people walking down the sidewalk outside Allen Premium Outlets in the north Dallas suburb.

The victims appear to initially freeze in panic, and what happens next is obscured by another car in the parking lot. But once that vehicle clears the camera frame, the shooter is the only person still visible.

A police officer who was responding to a different incident at the mall heard the gunshots, rushed to the scene and killed the attacker, Allen police said.

“I got him down,” the officer said in police radio recordings obtained by ABC News.

Twenty-year-old mall security guard Christian LaCour was among the eight people killed, his family told local media outlets. The other seven victims had not been publicly identified as of Sunday evening. The people killed were between the ages of 5 and 61, police said. Witnesses said multiple children appeared to be among the dead.

Three wounded victims remained in critical condition Sunday, Allen police said in a statement. Three other patients, including one at a children’s hospital, were in fair condition. The seventh surviving victim “was treated” at a hospital in the area, cops said.

“I pray it wasn’t kids, but it looked like kids,” said Fontayne Payton, who was shopping at H&M when he heard the gunfire. “It broke me when I walked out to see that.”

Garcia previously worked as a security guard in Texas, CNN reported. He held a private security license from 2016 to 2020 and received firearms training.

President Biden ordered flags at the White House, U.S. military bases and all public buildings to be flown at half-staff from Sunday through Thursday to honor the victims.

“Once again I ask Congress to send me a bill banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines,” Biden said in a Sunday statement. “Enacting universal background checks. Requiring safe storage. Ending immunity for gun manufacturers. I will sign it immediately. We need nothing less to keep our streets safe.”

The shooter was wearing tactical gear and carrying multiple weapons, one of them an assault-style rifle, according to investigators.

“Yesterday, an assailant in tactical gear armed with an AR-15 style assault weapon gunned down innocent people in a shopping mall, and not for the first time,” Biden said. “Such an attack is too shocking to be so familiar.”

Police are considering domestic terrorism as a possible motive for the attack, according to ABC News. The outlet mall will remain closed through at least Monday.

Saturday’s bloodshed in Texas was just the latest in an ever-growing list of mass killings across the United States. It was the second-deadliest attack of the year, behind the Jan. 21 shooting at a dance hall in Monterey Park, Calif.

The shooting came a day before seven people were killed and 10 others injured in an apparently intentional hit-and-run car crash outside a migrant shelter in Brownsville, about 450 miles south of Dallas.

With News Wire Services