Officials: Navy Yard shooter carved odd messages into his gun before carnage


View Photo Gallery — Aaron Alexis is identified as Navy Yard shooter: Authorities say the former Navy reservist, who had been living in Fort Worth, was the dead gunman at the Washington Navy Yard.


By Sari Horwitz, Rachel Weiner and Michael Laris,
Updated: Wednesday, September 18, 9:52 AM E-mail the writer

Aaron Alexis carved bizarre phrases on the stock of his shotgun before he killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard on Monday, and investigators are hoping the words provide clues to what prompted the shooting, two law enforcement officials said.

The phrases were “Better off this way” and “My ELF weapon,” according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.

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  • •12:05 PMTwelve victims. Twelve stories.
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  • •11:02 AMGunman went to two V.A. hospitals
  • •10:40 AMVideo: Gunman's mother is 'very sorry'

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    The officials cautioned they do not yet know what, if anything, Alexis meant in the etchings.
  • ELF generally stands for “extremely low frequency” and can refer to weather or communications efforts, among other things.
    Alexis, who was battling mental health issues, told police in Rhode Island in August that he was hearing voices of three people who had been sent to follow him and keep him awake and were using “some sort of microwave machine” to send vibrations into his body, preventing him from falling asleep, according to police reports.
    The law enforcement officials said they do not know whether he was referring to those vibrations in his carvings. The Navy has used extremely low frequencies in several capacities, including a joint effort with the Air Force on the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). HAARP is often cited by conspiracy theorists.

  • Meanwhile, in New York, Alexis’s mother expressed sorrow Wednesday for her son’s carnage.
    “Our son Aaron Alexis has murdered twelve people and wounded several others. His actions have had a profound and everlasting effect on the family of these victims,” Cathleen Alexis said in a statement read by a Brooklyn pastor.
    “I don’t know why he did what he did and I’ll never be able to ask him why. Aaron is in a place where he can no longer do harm to anyone. For that I am glad. To the families of the victims, I am so very sorry that this happened. My heart is broken.”
    The family’s statement came as military officials continued to react to shortcomings in the background check system that allowed Alexis access to military installations despite his self-described mental problems and a series of encounters with law enforcement.
    Adm. Jonathan W. Greenert, who serves as chief of naval operations and was evacuated from his Navy Yard residence shortly after shots were fired in Monday’s deadly rampage, told a congressional hearing on sequestration Wednesday that any vulnerabilities that may exist in security procedures are unrelated to cost-control measures cited in a recent Defense Department Inspector General’s report.
    “We don’t cut budgetary corners for security,” Greenert told lawmakers.
    “We lost shipmates on Monday,” Greenert said, adding that he expects a “rapid review” of “security procedures and access controls” to be completed within two weeks.
    Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were also set to brief the media late Wednesday morning.
    A New York neighbor of Alexis’s relatives indicated that the family had been estranged from Alexis.
    Ryan Stoner, a 33-year-old tattoo artist, lives in the apartment below Alexis’s mother, her two daughters, son-in-law and grandson. The family moved in about a year ago, he said. They mostly kept to themselves, but after a recent visit by the FBI, the two sisters came downstairs to talk.
    They said they had not talked to their brother in years and that he had never visited the Bedford-Stuyvesant home they had lived in for the past year. When Aaron’s sister, Naomi Alexis, got married, he was not at her wedding. Her husband, Anthony Little, had never met him, Stoner said.
    They said the FBI had asked them the same questions over and over, questions they couldn’t answer. “He was just estranged from the family,” Little told Stoner. The superintendent of the building had told Stoner that when Cathleen Alexis first moved in, she mentioned having daughters but not a son.
    Late that night, Stoner heard music coming from Cathleen Alexis’s bedroom, a bluesy record of a woman singing, along with sobbing. The next morning, his girlfriend asked Alexis if she was all right. “I don’t know,” she said.
    Alexis, a nurse, learned of the shooting at work, Stoner said Little had told him. Co-workers recognized the name on the television screen and pointed it out to her, and she then saw her son’s face.
    Stoner described Cathleen Alexis as “a stone wall” who did not speak much to her neighbors. They had clashed a bit over noise; she once complained to their landlord about marijuana smoke coming from his apartment. “She looked like she was always worn down. She was always tired.”

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