A school classmate of Ian Long, suspected of committing a mass shooting at a bar in Thousand Oaks, said that Long’s birthplace was Orange County. The classmate, Cole Marcum-Walsh, described him as a spoiled and contemptible individual with cowardice in him.
Long and Marcum-Walsh went to Silverado Elementary School together. The campus on Silverado Canyon turned into a politically controversial place in 2018 as it got proposed for use as a homeless shelter. Back in the day, Orange County had many displaced and homeless people.
Once, Long and Marcum-Walsh got into a fight where the latter beat the former. As Marcum-Walsh turned around, Long hit him with a compact folding scooter. Marcum-Walsh added that Long was the kind of guy who would just run away after throwing rocks at someone.
A tall guy came into Borderline Bar & Grill with his face partly covered as hundreds of individuals were working during or attending College Country Night. The person then shot the security guy around the entrance with a Glock 21 gun, turned to his right, and started to spray bodies with rounds of bullets. As the bullet smoke cleared, the man had shot 12 more individuals to death before he allegedly shot himself to death. About 15 other people were hurt, although almost everyone suffered minor bruises and cuts when escaping or protecting themselves from that onslaught.
College Country Night attracted California Lutheran University, California State University of Channel Islands, and Pepperdine University students.
Geoff Dean, the Sheriff of Ventura County, stated that the shooter made the attack with a magazine banned in California and a handgun bought legally. The device let the gunman fire more bullets without needing to reload his gun. The AP (Associate Press) reported that a smoking device was used as well.
As per reports, off-duty and unarmed law enforcement people in the bar used their bodies to safeguard other patrons at the time of the incident. Sergeant Ron Helus rushed to the location with an officer from the California Highway Patrol (CHP), but the gunman shot him to death. As for Dean, Helus planned on retiring from the force soon. The episode ended immediately after Helus entered the location as SWAT team members rushed in, so he was considered a hero.
Law enforcement identified the gunman as Long a while later. Dean said that his deputies earlier reacted to a telephone call from a different bar in which he had been a battery victim. Authorities did not immediately disclose why the gunman committed the crime and whether the earlier encounter contributed to it.
Long and his mother Colleen Long lived together in a Newbury Park place of residence. Newbury Park was around eight kilometers from the bar in which the shooting happened. The suspect with tattoos on his body drove his mother’s automobile to that location.
Originally a San Diego resident, Colleen Long had lived in Costa Mesa, Lake Forest, and Silverado too, as per online records. Internet telephone records associated a phone number from Trabuco Canyon with a person known as Ian Long.
As per social media, Colleen Long earlier worked at a Vans location headquartered in Costa Mesa at the time. For a long time, Colleen Long worked at the Dole Food Company’s Thousand Oaks location.
Marcum-Walsh remembered that she was a lovable woman who not only bought whatever her son wanted, including shoes, shirts, and caps from Vans but also went overseas with him. Marcum-Walsh did not remember having seen the father of Long at least once. He remembered that men were not in and around the Longs family and that the mother had no boyfriend. Marcum-Walsh also remembered that Long was into baseball at a young age and that he was a Seattle Mariners follower who loved the team’s player Ken Griffey Jr. He figured that Long would take up baseball as a career one day.
The Facebook page of Colleen Long included photographs of her and her son attending the matches of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Colleen Long applied blue color to her hair during the unproductive World Series campaign of the LA Dodgers from the Major League Baseball.
Marcum-Walsh also stated that Long went away from the canyon in his mid-school years to join the United States Marine Corps. However, Marcum-Walsh was surprised to learn that Long even served for the Marines in a war zone.
As per the US Marine Corps, he served in the force from 2008 to 2013, and his stint involved a mission in Afghanistan. The US Marine Corps also revealed that Long got a corporal’s rank as well as many ribbons and medals.
The neighbors of Colleen Long told reporters that her son had been suffering from PTSD since his return from the US Marine Corps. In April 2018, deputies visited his house as he was supposedly irate and behaving irrationally. While a team of mental health professionals was also called into the house, it was eventually determined that there was no need to take Long into custody.
Before the incident, what Marcum-Walsh last heard regarding Long was that the man had gotten hitched, fathered a kid, relocated to a Hawaii location, and then became divorced. Marcum-Walsh stated that Long tried to look up a former schoolmate on Facebook as well.
Was there any factor that made Marcum-Walsh feel that Long was off? It appeared to Marcum-Walsh that Long was a sociopath who did not even feel empathy for others. As for Marcum-Walsh, Long thought that he was a better person than all others and had more grand traits than was true. When it was mentioned that Marcum-Walsh was connected to a mass murderer, he stated that he had seen evil.