Remember the "Bronies?"
A brony is a fully grown man who enjoys watching My Little Pony, a TV show created for young girls. We made a short documentary about the bronies back in 2014 after they held a convention at a hotel near our radio station.
The brony subculture has been accused by critics of some pretty aberrant and unhealthy things (pedophilia, perversion, antisocialism, etc), but now there's a purported brony mass shooter.
The 19-year-old accused of shooting and killing eight people inside and around the FedEx facility in Indianapolis, Indiana, was reportedly a part of the adult following of My Little Pony.
Facebook reportedly took down two accounts connected with Brandon Scott Hole of Indiana, who is accused of opening fire at the facility before killing himself.
None of the information gleaned from the accounts revealed any clear motive for the shooting, but he was a part of the internet subculture of users who called themselves “bronies,” which is based on the children’s cartoon series My Little Pony, according to the Wall Street Journal.
There was a post timestamped less than an hour before the shooting that read, “I hope that I can be with Applejack in the afterlife, my life has no meaning without her,” and it featured an image of the cartoon pony Applejack.
Hole, a former employee, was placed in a mental health facility by law enforcement in 2020 after his mother contacted the police to report that he might try to commit “suicide by cop,” which is when a suicidal person provokes law enforcement officers to shoot at the individual.
The victims were identified as Matthew Alexander, 32, Samaria Blackwell, 19, Amarjeet Johal, 66, Jaswinder Kaur, 64, Jaswinder Singh, 68, Amarjit Sekhon, 48, Karli Smith, 19, and John Weisert, 74, among those who died in the attack.