Long lost warning: I feel confident to speak on this matter, not because I was a cop, but because while I was a cop I spent 4 years assigned to the FBI’s Central Texas Violent Crimes Task Force. Murder-for-hire was one of the crimes we investigated.
First, I hate to the bearer of bad news, but there’s really no such a thing as a “professional” hit man. I mean, organized crime (e.g. cartels, mafia, OMGs etc..) have dudes whom they trust to do their dirty work, but beyond that there’s no John Wick type of network out there you can reach out to for dirt work. Almost all hits are done by “a-friend-of-a-friend knows a guy” type of guys, and those dudes are just some guy willing to kill someone for money. They commonly make mistakes.
Now, the organized crime dudes are more… well, organized. Here in the states, they almost never kill someone. Making a public statement to terrorize the locals might fly in places like Mexico, but not here. They make them go missing… never to return. What does that mean? It’s so much harder to investigate when someone just vanishes without a trace. Murders leave crime scenes that can be investigated. Vanishings do not. And one thing all these guys have in common, is not wanting to get caught. Most states and the feds book one-way tickets to death row for murder-for-hire.
Watching this video, I can give a little insight, but wouldn’t be able to give a really informed opinion with reading the reports and going through the evidence and case files.
The weapon handling actually tells me this dude was prepared, and did likely practice. Why, you ask? Watch the video again (I watched it like 7 times). He raises the pistol with two hands in a shooters grip, not John Wayne one handed, or with the gangsta side tilt. As soon as he fires his first round, he immediately cycles the slide. No hesitation. That tells me he anticipated having to do that, which means he could be using a modified slide, so it has to be manually cycled. That would be to help sound suppression. Most of the sound you hear from a semi-auto being fired with a supressor are (a) the projectile breaking the sound barrier, if not using subsonic loads, (b) the weapon cycling, and (c) the propellant ignition that utilizes blow back to cycle the slide. Use subsonic ammo and closed/locked chamber if you really want Hollywood quality quiet.
Turning the slide to left and cycling like that is a pretty common move to cycle a slide. I’ve done it. It’s fast, and I’ve mostly seen it in competition shooting, but I have see it in malfunction drills. Gravity doesn’t dislodge a malfunction in a handgun nearly as well as the weapon’s extractor does. If he’s using a modified handgun that’s slide has to be manually operated to cycle, this would be the best/fastest way to do it.
The dude does start fumbling when cycling the slide. I would attribute that to adrenaline, instead of poor weapon handling. His heart would have already would been thumping leading up to the first one or two shots, but once his brain kicks in and thinks “holy shit, I’m actually doing this,” it would have been like a jackhammer in his chest, tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, loss of fine motor skills, everything that hits you during a hard adrenaline dump. You kinda go on auto-pilot, and if you haven’t spent literally thousand of hours practicing something, and have to rely on calling a mental audible instead of just reacting due to muscle memory, you’re gonna fumble.
That last part tells me the shooter might have practiced or even have experience shooting guns, but doesn’t have experience shooting people. Trust me when I tell it’s not the same thing.
What really points to the being “amateur” is that the shooter goes for the kill right underneath a camera, and in front of a witness. That, my friends, is what we call bush league. The shooter is wearing all black with a white backpack. That is distinct. How many other cameras are in that neighborhood that you think this dude walked past either to or from the scene? How many other people might have remembered this dude? Now the cops know what to look for. Do y’all remember the Austin bomber? I worked on that one, and that’s how we nailed that dude down…
I’m interested to see how one this plays out. Was it a murder-for-hire, someone with a person vendetta, someone just wanted to kill a man just to watch him die? I have no clue, because I don’t know anything of the details, and won’t theorize.
