A Michigan man with purported beliefs in the QAnon conspiracy theory was killed in a police shootout Sunday after he fatally shot his wife and severely injured their daughter at their suburban Detroit home.
The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office identified the man as 53-year-old Igor Lanis of Walled Lake, a small community 30 miles northwest of Detroit. Lanis did not have a history of violence or protective orders against him, officials said, but according to his youngest daughter, who was not home during the attack, Lanis in recent years had grown increasingly in the thrall of the sprawling and baseless conspiracy movement known as QAnon.
Rebecca Lanis, 21, told the Detroit News on Sunday that after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, her father began consuming “crazy ideas” online, including conspiracy theories about vaccines and Trump.
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“Nobody could talk him out of them,” she told the outlet.
On Sunday, police received a 911 call just after 4 a.m. from a young woman who said she had just been shot by her father, the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. When officers arrived at the scene and moved toward the home after hearing a gunshot, Lanis came out the front door armed with a pump-action shotgun and began to fire at the officers.
Police fired back, fatally shooting Lanis.
Officers then saw Lanis’s 25-year-old daughter, Rachel, attempting to crawl out of the front door before they dragged her to safety. She was later hospitalized and listed in stable condition. Rachel Lanis, who had placed the initial 911 call, told police her father had shot her and killed her mother.
Tina Lanis, 56, was found dead inside the home with multiple gunshot wounds to the back from an apparent attempt to flee out the front door, according to the sheriff’s office. The family’s dog was also found dead with multiple gunshot wounds.
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Rebecca Lanis, who was staying at a friend’s home for a birthday and was not home during the shooting, did not immediately respond to an interview request Monday. But in a Reddit forum for people who have lost connection to loved ones because of QAnon, she firmly blamed the conspiracy theory movement for her family’s tragedy.
Share this articleShare“I want the media to call out Q because this is all their fault,” she wrote. She lamented how her father’s fall down the QAnon “rabbit hole” changed him from a loving, fun and carefree man to someone who “would get really pissy over the smallest things” and warn of imagined dangers posed by modern medicine or 5G towers.
“It’s like he got possessed by a demon,” she wrote.
The sheriff’s office said there is an active investigation into the incident and did not give a motive.
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QAnon gained momentum as a viral online movement around late 2017. Its followers waited for posts by an anonymous figure known as “Q” who proclaimed to be a high-level government insider privy to secrets of the “Deep State.”
The movement has shifted its focus and evolved over the years, but has been linked to a growing number of criminal incidents, including the Jan. 6, 2021, siege at the U.S. Capitol, where multiple QAnon adherents were arrested.
In a 2019 intelligence bulletin, the FBI listed QAnon among the “anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories” that “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”
Last year, a California man who became obsessed with QAnon confessed to killing his 2-year-old son and 10-month-old daughter with a spearfishing gun after becoming “enlightened” by the group. Matthew Taylor Coleman told FBI interviewers that he had received signs that this wife “possessed serpent DNA,” and had passed it to their children.
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Jack Bratich, an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information who researches QAnon, said the group can be especially appealing to people who have been destabilized by a mass trauma — such as the coronavirus pandemic — or who more generally cling to QAnon as a way to cope with a changing world where they feel less comfortable.
“QAnon gave some people a sense of purpose and a narrative that almost assured a certain kind of future,” Bratich said. To preserve that, adherents may act out and behave in almost paranoid ways.
“They may act as if they’re protecting a bunker, and treating other people — even family — like an enemy,” he said.
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