Tag: secrecy

It’s now been eight days since 24-year-old Chad Williams walked up to a brand-new In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho — the place had barely finished its grand opening, having only cracked its doors on July 24 — and turned a fast-food parking lot into a crime scene. He killed three people, including employee Ashley Garibay, and wounded seven more before putting a bullet in himself after roughly 90 minutes of chaos. Wikipedia has assembled the fullest timeline so far, and it’s worth reading in full if you can stomach it.

Here’s what we actually know, stripped of the speculation everyone’s been layering on top of it:

Williams pulled up to the drive-thru payment window and shot Garibay first. He then pulled forward, parked, got out, and shot Christopher Claunch, who was sitting in another car, minding his own business, ordering a burger like everyone else that day. Former Twin Falls police officer and former Idaho state trooper Austin James Scott ran toward the gunfire to confront him — Williams shot and wounded Scott too, forcing him to retreat. Williams then doubled back to the payment window and opened fire on employees who were trying to keep Garibay alive. His handgun jammed at some point in all this, so he calmly walked back to his own car, grabbed a rifle, and picked up right where he left off. It took an armed bystander named Lane Koehn, along with return fire from other citizens, to finally drive him off. He shot himself before police ever got a hand on him.

What we still don’t have, eight days later, is the “why.” And that gap is where everyone’s imagination has gone to work overtime.

Police Chief Matthew Hicks says detectives are confident Williams acted alone and that his family is cooperating fully with the investigation. Beyond that, the well runs dry. 

Williams attended the College of Southern Idaho from 2022 to 2023 and left without a credential — he’d also held a student government position there, one from which he was booted in February 2023, roughly 10 months before he stopped showing up at CSI altogether. Nobody’s saying why he got the boot, and nobody’s saying why he left. Funny how that particular detail hasn’t made it into any official statement yet. A former dorm hallmate who considered Williams a genuine friend, one Elijah Moseley, called him “an introvert” and “a pretty chill guy” who never once seemed alarming. Which tells us exactly nothing, as I dug into a few days back — plenty of perfectly ordinary introverts never shoot up a drive-thru, and plenty of people who eventually do exactly that spend years looking completely unremarkable right up until the moment they don’t.

In the lack of information, I have a couple theories that are admittedly as thin as the data is, but I’ll toss ’em out anyway:

The timing — going from handgun to jammed handgun to full rifle, mid-attack, without hesitation — makes me wonder if this started as something absurdly small. The place had only been open a matter of days. New staff, new systems, plenty of room for a botched order. 

Thing is, if Williams snapped over something as petty as a screwed-up burger from a crew that hadn’t found its rhythm yet, that alone doesn’t explain a man showing up already armed and ready to escalate to a rifle. Something else had to be sitting underneath that, whether it was medication, a breakdown building for weeks, or some other pressure nobody’s disclosed. Call it a hunch, and weigh it accordingly.

I’ll also cop to my own first instinct, which came up before any of all that, since I try not to pretend I didn’t have one. 

Given the run of recent shooters where the shooter was trans and on meds, and where that detail eventually surfaced days into coverage, my gut went there initially, too. At this point, I’m not ruling it out entirely, but nothing in the reporting on Williams points that direction, and the longer this drags on without that detail surfacing, the less I’m inclined to keep leaning on it. 

At this point, I find myself circling a different, equally unproven idea instead: that Williams may have known his first victim, Ashley Garibay. If the pictures do her justice, she was a rather pretty girl, I must say.  The idea here is that she was specifically targeted rather than randomly chosen. That’s speculation and nothing more, and I’ll say so plainly, rather than dress it up as something sturdier.

Finally, I observe that In-N-Out opened a new place in Colorado as well, back in 2020, which prompted lines of 12 to 14 hours. In-N-Out has been going through a fairly large expansion over the last few years. In-N-Out opened its first two Colorado locations — one in Aurora, one in Colorado Springs — on Friday, November 20, 2020. The Aurora location, near a shopping mall, saw demand so extreme that the drive-thru line stretched 1.5 to 2 miles, wrapped around the mall property twice, and backed up nearby highways. Aurora police initially estimated a 12-hour wait, then revised it up to 14 hours. I’ve seen that phenom myself during a local opening of a Chick-fil-A, which was so huge it required three local police cars to keep traffic moving off the main road the place was on. Estimates in that case were a couple of hours. Which leads me here: The In-N-Out in Twin Falls had just opened a few days before the incident, which makes me wonder if the situation there wasn’t similar in its drive-thru. Interesting that this didn’t get mentioned.

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