Mall shooting suspect: ‘Creepy,’ multiple arrests, disputes

OAK HARBOR, Wash. – The 20-year-old man suspected of killing five people with a rifle at a Macy’s makeup counter Friday had a string of run-ins with the law in recent years, including charges he assaulted his stepfather, and was described by a neighbor as so “creepy, rude and obnoxious” that she kept a Taser by her front door.

As investigators tried to piece together information on Arcan Cetin, who was arrested Saturday evening after a nearly 24-hour manhunt, a picture emerged of a troubled young man. Court records show more than a half-dozen criminal cases in Island County alone since 2013.

Authorities said the gunman at the Cascade Mall in Burlington opened fire in the department store’s cosmetics department, killing a man and four females ranging from a teenager to a senior citizen. The killer then fled.

Cetin said nothing and appeared “zombie-like” when he was taken into custody on a sidewalk outside his apartment complex some 30 miles away in Oak Harbor by a sheriff’s officer who recognized him as the suspect, authorities said.

Cetin immigrated to the U.S. from Turkey and is a legal permanent resident, officials said.

As the surrounding area absorbed news of the arrest, critical questions remained, including the gunman’s motive. The FBI said there was no indication the shooting was terrorism, but local authorities said they had ruled out nothing.

Some published reports described an ex-girlfriend who worked at Macy’s but left months ago.

“It’s hard for me to figure out a motive,” Burlington Mayor Steve Sexton said.

On Sunday, investigators searched Cetin’s vehicle and the apartment complex and were seen carrying boxes from a rear, upstairs unit. Detectives would not say what they found.

Amber Cathey, 21, lived in an apartment next to Cetin for the past three months and said she was so frightened by him that she complained to apartment management and kept a stun gun handy. Cathey said she blocked him on Snapchat after he sent her a photo of his crotch.

“He was really creepy, rude and obnoxious,” Cathey said. She said she would try to avoid him by walking the long way around to her apartment if she saw his car in the parking lot. The two were in high school together as well, and Cathey said he acted the same way then.

Several of Cetin’s former classmates described him as a socially awkward teenager who later was given to inappropriately touching female students.

“He had some kind of issues, to say the least,” said Miranda Schnecker, who knew Cetin from middle school and high school. “He was just very awkward, didn’t know how to connect with people – and a lot of people didn’t know how to handle that, so he wasn’t very popular.”

It was in high school, she said, when Cetin began to touch girls inappropriately, Schnecker said. Another classmate, Rosie Aguilera, said Cetin would try to touch her and other young women at the school “as some kind of joke to him.”

Aguilera remembered Cetin as being awkward but also piping up frequently with needling comments in the Algebra 2 class they shared at Oak Harbor.

“He liked to talk a lot,” Aguilera said. “Most times the things he said threw people off.”

Cetin faced three charges of assaulting his stepfather, court records show. The Seattle Times reported that Cetin also was arrested on drunken driving charges.

In the assault case, Cetin was told by a judge last December that he was not to possess a gun, the newspaper reported. However, the stepfather urged the judge not to impose a no-contact order, saying his stepson was “going through a hard time.”

As of May, court records suggest that Cetin may have been working as a dishwasher and attending college. A notation in those records on Aug. 25 indicates that he was receiving some type of weekly counseling. The court records refer to alcohol, substance abuse and mental health evaluations. They include notes stating that Cetin “was in treatment” or receiving “counseling” as far back as a year and a half ago.

Attempts to reach Cetin’s family for comment by phone and social media weren’t immediately successful. It wasn’t clear if Cetin had a lawyer yet.

In posts on his Facebook page, Cetin described himself as working as a bagger at Whidbey Island Commissary. In high school, he was in a junior Reserve Officers Training Corps program. Social media accounts apparently belonging to Cetin showed an affinity for the military and for video games, although authorities said Sunday they had only confirmed his Facebook account.

He posted on Facebook last year that he was molested by a relative in Turkey as a young boy – and that he wanted to get what happened “off my chest.”

A Twitter account showed, among other things, selfies, photos of him in younger years and pictures of Turkish food. He once participated in paintball and said he “can’t wait for Halo 5,” the first-person shooter video game. He also tweeted: “Shout out to the ROTC peeps.” A Facebook account showed he liked military-related sites.

Cetin also appeared to have blogs on the site Tumblr that had not been updated in many months. They included seemingly random posts about serial killer Ted Bundy, a collection of selfies, the top-secret Area 51 Cold War test site and photos of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and Islamic State group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The two blogs linked back to each other, and one of them linked to what appeared to be his Twitter page.

Cetin took part in his high school’s ROTC program with former classmate Matthew McClimans, who described the suspect as “a pretty normal guy, but he was a little bit weird.”

“Every once in a while he’d make inappropriate comments – things that are rude or in bad taste,” McClimans said.