A QAnon follower and election denier killed his wife and injured one of his children after “falling down the conspiracy rabbit hole,” his daughter says.
Igor Lanis, 53, was gunned down by the Walled Lake, Michigan, Police Department on Sunday after he allegedly fatally shot his wife Tina, 56, and shot his daughter Rachel in the leg and back. Officers were talking to a neighbour in the 1200 block of Glenwood Court when they heard the shots and returned fire from Lanis, according to The Detroit News.
Rebecca Lanis, who was at a party at the time of the shooting, said her father’s mental health had declined due to his obsession with conspiracy theories, including 5G towers, world leaders being lizards, and vaccines, the Daily Beast reported. In a Reddit entry posted just hours after the killings and titled “My Qdad snapped and killed my family this morning”, Rebecca said the 2020 Trump election loss and the following widespread denial by far-right groups had made things worse.
“He had a sense of reality,” Rebecca told the Daily Beast. “But then after 2020, when Trump lost, he started going down these crazy rabbit holes.”
“[Expletive], Qanon. I hope the FBI tightens its grip on you and that your lackies rot in prison (and hell) for poisoning so many people,” Rebecca wrote on the Reddit QAnon subpage.
Hours later, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the shooting around 4am in Walled Lake. Tina died at the scene after she was shot four times, while Rachel managed to notify authorities of the attack. The family dog was also found killed.
Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard told The Detroit News that Ms Lanis had the keys to his vehicle and his weapon with him when he exited the house and was stopped by officers responding to the scene.
“I think there was danger to anybody,” Bouchard said. “He had his keys with him so who knows where he was headed ... This is terribly sad on so many levels.”
In a statement shared to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office official Facebook page, authorities said that upon arrival to the home, Lanis “exited out of the front door of the address, presented a Remington 870 pump action shotgun, and fired on officers.” They also “observed the 911 caller/victim, a 25-year-old female, at the front door of the responsible address attempting to crawl from the home. They dragged her to safety.”
The statement noted that they found Tina, “a deceased 56-year-old female who was shot multiple times in the back” in the residence and it appeared “that she was also attempting to flee out of the front door.” A further investigation by the Oakland County Special Investigations Unit and the Walled Lake Police Department is “ongoing.”
Lanis had no criminal history but had become increasingly violent with his family following Trump’s election defeat in 2020. Ms Lanis wrote in the post that her father kept reading conspiracy theories about the stolen election and began distrusting family members who tried to talk sense into him.
“It’s really so shocking but it really can happen to anybody,” she told The Detroit News. “Right-wing extremism is not funny, and people need to watch their relatives and if they have guns, they need to hide them or report them or something because this is out of control.”
