Highland Park woman says someone should have caught shooting suspect's red flags: 'People died here because nobody did anything'
- A Highland Park woman told Insider that someone should have caught the shooting suspect's red flags.
- "That young man, troubled for sure, someone knew about him," Susanne Evans told Insider.
A woman from Highland Park, Illinois, told Insider she thinks someone should have caught the shooting suspect's red flags before the massacre at the town's annual Fourth of July parade on Monday.
"That young man, troubled for sure, someone knew about him," Susanne Evans, a 72-year-old who lives blocks from where the shooting happened, told Insider of the shooting suspect. "His parents, his teachers, if he had any friends."
Evans did not go into detail about possible red flags. NBC News previously reported that the suspect posted violent images on a Discord server and that a now-suspended YouTube account belonging to the suspect featured a cartoon video of a man holding a long gun and being shot by police.
"All you had to do was google him and see all the stuff he did," Evans told Insider. "If I could find it, other people knew. And nobody had an alarm. He was a ticking time bomb, and people died here because nobody did anything."
"It's horrifying," she said. "This is our community."
Evans told Insider that her two grandkids — 6-year-old twins — were at the parade with their mother when a gunman started shooting at the crowd from the roof of a nearby restaurant.
"My daughter-in-law came running to my house with the kids 20 minutes after they left for the parade," Evans, who has lived in Highland Park for 43 years, said.
She recalled "hundreds of people" running by her house on Monday, away from the scene.
"The little ones thought it was fireworks, but she knew what it was," Evans said, adding that the kids "wanted to know why they had to leave when the fireworks were just starting."
Six people were killed in the massacre and dozens of others were treated for injuries. The suspect — a 21-year-old man — was arrested after an hours-long manhunt Monday.
A previous version of this article said the shooting supect was 22 years old. He is 21.