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Gun-obsessed Idaho firefighter slayer Wess Roley left a chilling goodbye letter to his father, along with multiple twisted drawings depicting himself dying during his premeditated ambush on a pair of firefighters he killed in late June.
The Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office shared the new documents detailing 20-year-old Roley’s erratic behavior and his odd patterns of speech at a press conference Tuesday.
Multiple drawings depicted crude sketches of Roley with gunshot wounds and even a Pentagram on his forehead, including one he titled “Goodbye Wess.”
Investigators also found a letter riddled with spelling inaccuracies that Roley wrote to his father in his vehicle at the scene on Canfield Mountain, where he intentionally set a fire and waited just a few yards away for firefighters to arrive before opening fire, killing two and injuring a third.
“Hello Father, I write this to you in a concerned effort that you may read this in upmost sincerity. Tomorrow I shall go into battle if I survive, it would be with upmost dishonor. I bid thee farewell, I hope that you shall live to the fullest extent as you have thus far,” Roley wrote.
“I beg that you do not fall into the traps of modern existence, with media and other false pleasantries that plague the minds of individuals today. Propaganda of sorts. You are a upstanding individual and I wish you the best.”
The cryptic letter echoed Roley’s posts on social media during the hours leading up to the shooting, including one saying he was “going hunting.”
He also displayed other disturbing patterns of behavior when he was still just a teenager and would often doodle Swastikas and weapons in his notebooks at school, according to investigators.
Just one month before his deadly attack, Roley tried to apply to be a firefighter at the Coeur d’Alene Fire Department — the very station he would attack.
During the application process, Roley, who had a history of unmedicated ADHD and marijuana use he struggled to quit, quickly “became agitated with the process and left frustrated,” Kootenai County Sheriff Bob Norris said.
He also tried to enlist in the US Army three times, but consistently neglected to follow up on required tasks and appointments, which led to his disqualification, KREM reported.
Many of the documents recovered during the ongoing investigation — including the shared letter and drawings — are still being reviewed, Norris said.
On June 29, Roley shot and killed two firefighters responding to a fire he set in northern Idaho before turning the gun on himself.
Eerily, the father he lauded in his goodbye letter previously threatened to set a fire and shoot his family with a sniper rifle during messy divorce proceedings in 2015. Because of his threats, a protective order was put in place at his mother’s request, barring his father from contacting the family.
It is unclear when the order may have expired.
English (US)