ABERDEEN: Law enforcement officials said on Saturday they might never know the motive for a female shooter’s violent rampage that killed three people and wounded three at a sprawling Maryland warehouse before she turned the gun on herself. It’s little consolation for grieving relatives and others trying to find answers.

The suspect, 26-year-old Snochia Moseley of Baltimore County, had been diagnosed with some kind of mental illness in 2016 but had legally purchased the handgun she carried in the deadly Thursday morning attack, Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler told reporters a day after the violence. But he said what ultimately triggered the workplace shooting is still a mystery and may remain so.

“Frankly, when someone does something like this, such violence against other human beings, we’re never going to make sense of it or understand it fully,” the sheriff said at a press conference.

Law enforcement officials said the particulars of Moseley’s mental illness history would not have flagged her from purchasing a gun in Maryland, where buyers cannot pass a background check if they were either involuntarily committed for any period of time or voluntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility for at least 30 consecutive days.

A family friend of one of the victims killed in the shooting at the drugstore distribution centre in Aberdeen, Maryland, said the immigrant family from Nepal was utterly wracked with despair and confounded as to how a person with a history of mental illness had a gun in the first place.

“They cannot understand how this could happen. In Nepal, there are very few homicides. They are asking: ‘How did this person access a gun?” said Harry Bhandari, a community leader and candidate for state delegate who has known 41-year-old Brindra Giri’s family for about 10 years.

Giri, a mother of two, had only recently moved to the US from her homeland of Nepal to join her husband, an employee of a local liquor store. Authorities identified her as one of the three people killed when Moseley, a temp employee, opened fired at the Rite Aid facility.

The county sheriff told reporters that Moseley had become increasingly agitated in recent weeks, and relatives had been concerned for her well-being. She used a 9 mm Glock that she legally purchased in March to fire a total of 13 rounds on Thursday morning and died after shooting herself in the head.

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2018