Don’t you find it bizarre that investigators asked Long why he targeted massage parlors but never followed up with why he thought they were “safe” or any other natural follow up questions? If you ever watch an interview, they get very specific and keep asking questions to keep the suspect talking. Not just about physical elements of an event, but why they made the decisions they did along the way. So it’s likely that they did — maybe not those specific ones, but some kind of follow up. It just wasn’t part of the statement released to the public.

It’s also not uncommon for investigators to leave some things up to the lawyers and psych evaluations, etc to determine.

Exactly what sort of evidence would be enough for you to accept race as a factor anyway? Where do you expect that evidence is going to come from?

My problem with the “no evidence" stance like yours and Joe Duncan and a few others is that it’s biased in it’s own way.

We only know what’s been released to the public. We got just enough to leave us dangling but no where near enough to keep a fair and balanced perspective. Our minds want to fill in the gaps one way or the other. It’s too uncomfortable not to.

So while it’s true that there has been no evidence the crime was motivated by racial hatred released to the public there’s also been no evidence released that racial biases based on hate, fetish, or whatever had nothing whatsoever to do with the crime. We don’t know all the evidence they have or what evidence they’re still gathering/evaluating. We only know what they’ve told us to date.

We also don’t know if they’re not pursuing race aspect for other reasons.

Unless you deal with both sides of that equitably, the “no evidence" argument chooses a tribe and fills in gaps with a particular point of view.

We can grieve for and honor all the dead without dismissing some or forgetting others.