Q Comes to Walled Lake

Q Comes to Walled Lake

I had heard a few weeks ago that some whack job maniac in a suburb 20 minutes from me killed his wife, oldest daughter, and dog, and was shot to death by police. Like most news readers, I thought, Holy Hell, what pushed a man to kill his wife, daughter, and dog? His dog? What did his dog do to him?

We get used to hearing stories about crazy loners who take automatic weapons and kill black people in a grocery store or Jews in a synagogue or random Chicago suburbanites from the top of a store during a parade. Sadly, we hear horror stories too often but a local man who kills his family? That’s not something you hear every day. But when his surviving 21-year-old daughter who thankfully wasn’t at their house said that her dad believed “deep state” forces stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump, staged mass shootings and the “fake” January 6th riot, and hatched plots to harm Americans with vaccines and 5G technology,” I knew that this wasn’t Kansas anymore.

It is the Michigan suburbs and post-President-Trump-America.

“This is an unbelievably horrific act,” Sheriff Michael Bouchard said. “It is so sad on so many levels.”

Police said Igor Lanis killed his wife, 56, and dog, and seriously injured his 25-year-old daughter, who was able to crawl away and called 911. She told dispatchers her father had just shot her but was too traumatized and distraught to tell them much more.

Bouchard credited fast-acting Walled Lake officers and deputies with saving her life while shooting Igor Lanis. The date of the shootings and Igor’s death was September 11^th, 21 years exactly after other madmen killed over 3000 American citizens.

Rachel Lanis is now in the hospital. Her condition, after surgery, was upgraded from critical to stable condition.

The Detroit News confirmed that there was another daughter, Rebecca, who was not at the house because “she was at a friend’s house for a birthday” and blamed “her father’s mental health on his recent online interest in extremism and conspiracy theories.”

Rebecca Lanis later said that it “kept getting worse and he verbally snapped at us a few times,” but on Sunday, it turned violent after “he had an argument with my mother” and then suddenly used the guns in the home to fire at his wife and daughter, who was in the house.

According to the Sheriff’s Office, after the 911 call, Walled Lake police and sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the Lanis residence on Glenwood Drive at 4:11 a.m. The caller, later identified as a 25-year-old daughter, told dispatchers her father had just shot her.

As they searched the area, deputies heard a gunshot and headed toward the house when Lanis burst through the front door and fired − at least twice − with a Remington 870 shotgun. Lanis hit a car that an officer was behind and a home. A Walled Lake officer and a deputy returned fire, fatally shooting Lanis.

Deputies found the daughter who was shot “trying to crawl from the home.” Her mother’s body was found during a search of the home. She had been shot multiple times in the back, and it appeared she was trying to flee out the front door.

Autopsies of Lanis and his wife, Bouchard said, indicate they both died from gunshot wounds, although official results are pending. The sheriff added that officials are now checking cellphones and other electronic devices belonging to Lanis to see if they hold any clues to a motive for the shootings.

On the next day, the younger sister, Rebecca, put up a GoFundMe page  https://www.gofundme.com/f/family-victim-of-fatal-shooting, to help pay for her sister’s traumatic injuries. “Hi, my name is Rebecca Lanis, and on September 11, 2022, I lost my mother, father, and dog in a fatal shooting perpetrated by my father. My older sister, who is just 25 years old, was seriously wounded and remains in the hospital. Any support provided will assist me in paying my sister’s medical bills and will help us get back on our feet after this horrific tragedy. Our aunt, Mela, has set up this fund with support from our family members. Donations will be transferred from her directly to my sister and me to help with these expenses.”

Rebecca Lanis has raised over $71,000 in the first month of this GoFundMe page.

When I first posted this GoFundMe post on my Facebook page, my daughter, a teacher, wrote how horrible this act was. What I didn’t know until then was that Rebecca and her sister had both gone to Hillel Day School, a Jewish day school in Farmington Hills, the same school that all three of our kids went to, the same school that my oldest daughter teaches at today. Two graduates of Hillel, now in their early 20s, had just lost their mother, their dog, and their father, who had become a fanatic follower of Trump’s election lies and QAnon.

We have become bombarded by all sorts of crazy shit in the political world but we don’t imagine that it can hit so close to home. Almost 300 of the candidates for Congress in November’s election have denied that Donald Trump lost the last presidential election to Joe Biden. Trump is still the leader of the Republican Party, has pushed many candidates who believe him instead of normal government officials. He also plays songs from QAnon at his rallies and many in his audiences put up the signs of QAnon.

“I want the media to call out Q because this is all their fault,” Rebecca Lanis wrote, after the tragedy. 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.

As a Jew, it is especially disturbing to see another Jew, also a father of children who went to a Jewish Day School, turn from a law-abiding normal citizen to one who believed in stolen elections and a conspiracy-ridden anti-Semitic extremist group, urging its followers to hate Democrats, liberals, Jews, and minorities who don’t believe what they believe.

The Jewish funeral site posted this in Igor Lanis’s obituary, “Dear father of Rachel Lanis and Rebecca Lanis. Loving son of Sofia Lanis and Jacob Fayn. Also survived by many other loving family members and friends.”  They didn’t write that Igor was possessed by political demons that have destroyed many other lives and left a trail of death, including the January 6, 2021 insurrection on the Capitol.

When insanity and murder come so close to our homes and deeply affects people like us, we have to stop and wonder what has happened to so many people in our country.

No one is immune to hatred and violence. No one.