A YouTube channel with numerous videos of the suspect in Monday's Highland Park shooting posted clips that showed telegraphed violence, including one showing the parade route that was targeted and another showing an animated shooting.
The channel, zerotwo, has been removed from YouTube, but the archive of the channel and its videos remains online.
The suspect, Robert Bobby E. Crimo III, 21, ran a separate YouTube account called Awake, which was also the name under which Crimo performed as a rapper. The account was independently verified by law enforcement officials as associated with Crimo.
The zerotwo channel, a screenshot captured by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, appeared to contain archived footage of Crimo, who is visible in many of the channel's videos and profile picture. It contained 17 videos posted within the past two years, all of which were under five minutes long. Some of them contained the same scenes and imagery from Crimo's Awake channel.
The most recent video on the zerotwo channel, uploaded eight months ago, included a cartoon figure shooting people and a voice-over that implied violence.
One of the videos, titled Robert Crimo Archive Footage: File XM 058, appears to show the site of the parade route that was the site of the deadly shooting that killed seven people and injured dozens more on Monday during a Fourth of July parade. Crimo was arrested later in the day.
NBC News viewed a copy of the File XM 058 video, which is 17 seconds long and was uploaded 10 months ago. It shows a wide shot of an empty street in the early morning. The camera is moving as if it is attached to the back of a vehicle driving down the street, and an emergency siren sound can be heard over the footage, although it is not clear whether the audio was edited into the footage. Crimo is not visible in the video.
A YouTube spokesperson said in an emailed statement: Following the horrific incident in Highland Park, our Trust and Safety teams identified and quickly removed violative content, in accordance with our Community Guidelines. We have terminated a number of channels in accordance with our creator responsibility guidelines. The parade route is described as starting on St. John s Avenue before turning onto Central Avenue, according to the city of Highland Park's website. The street view of Central Avenue provided by Google Maps matches the footage from the YouTube video.
Authorities said Tuesday that they believe Crimo planned the attack for several weeks and wore women s clothing during the shooting to avoid detection. Crimo climbed a fire escape ladder to reach the roof of a building next to the parade route, where he fired more than 70 rounds into the crowd below, authorities said.
Crimo, a Highland Park native, used a legally purchased high-powered rifle that is similar to an AR-15.
Christopher Covelli, of the Lake County Major Crime Task Force, said in a press conference on Tuesday morning that Crimo had been planning the crime for weeks, and that authorities had been looking into online posts associated with the shooter to determine a motive.
Crimo was active on forums that focused on violent videos and extremism in the years before the attack. Crimo was an active participant on a forum that only aggregated videos of murders and violent incidents on the web, last posting in the week before the shooting. Crimo railed on Discord against commies. He was rapped under his rap name Awake. The SS channel, a Discord channel, was first discovered by researchers at the Unicorn Riot, a nonprofit media group that tracks the far right.
Crimo called a manifesto as an Amazon e-book, which consisted of 28 pages of numbers that were supposed to be decoded. The e-book, published in February 2021, is no longer available on Amazon.