Dueling Images: A Smiling Young Marine and a Killer Dressed in Black

NEWBURY PARK, Calif. — In photos that Ian D. Long’s mother proudly posted to Facebook, her son is a young Marine: smiling, crew-cut, in a crisp uniform. When he opened fire in a crowded bar late on Wednesday, killing 12 people, his face was covered and he was dressed in black. He was armed with smoke grenades and a high-capacity magazine for his pistol, and was full of an inexplicable rage.

What changed Long, who was found dead at the bar, has this Southern California community scrambling for answers. The authorities said they suspected that he might have had post traumatic stress after a deployment in Afghanistan but was ultimately determined to have posed no threat. Neighbors said he was a solitary figure who lived with his mother, and sometimes clashed with her.

As news of the mass shooting at the Borderline Bar & Grill in Thousand Oaks, California, spread to his former battalion, shocked veterans wondered if the troubles that led their fellow Marine to kill innocent civilians in a crowded bar had resided in him before the military, or if he had brought them home from war.

“I’m not surprised someone I knew ended up doing a mass shooting. We had another guy recently committed suicide by cops in Texas,” said Sam Tanner, who served with Long and described him as a friend. “Guys struggle. We’ve lost more Marines in our peer group to suicide than we ever lost in Afghanistan.”

Another friend said he could not match the Marine he knew, who had been given a good conduct award, with the man who barged into the bar.

“He was a really good guy. He gave me the Bible I still carry today,” said Dewayne Pettiford, who was his roommate in the military. “We were trained as machine-gunners, so you know you are capable of doing something like this. But that he did it makes no sense. It is against all our values.”

Long, 28, lived with his mother on a quiet street of palm trees and tidy ranch houses. Neighbors said that when Long moved in after leaving the military, they regularly heard yelling in the Long house, and sometimes at night, gunfire.

Tom Hanson, 70, who has lived in the home next to the Longs for decades, called 911 about a year ago, concerned about the yelling.

“I didn’t know if he was going to kill himself or what he would do, so I called the sheriff to investigate,” he said.

Another neighbor, Donald Macleod, who lived behind the Longs, said Thursday morning that agents in FBI jackets were searching the house, where he once heard gunfire at night, and Long arguing with his mother.

According to Sheriff Geoff Dean, Long was also the victim in a January 2015 fight at a different bar in Thousand Oaks.

The sheriff’s office said that after a disturbance at the house in April, mental health specialists had talked to Long, discussing his service in the Marine Corps and whether he had PTSD. They determined that he was not an immediate danger to himself or others and that he could not be involuntarily taken to a mental hospital.

Long joined the Marine Corps after high school in August 2008, just as the Marines were preparing for a bloody campaign in Afghanistan to take the Helmand province from the Taliban, according to Marine Corps records. He trained as a machine-gunner, and was assigned the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment in Hawaii. Marines who served with him described him as a health-food and fitness fanatic who liked to lift weights to loud music.

The battalion deployed in 2010 to Helmand, but Long was held back because the battalion had limited space and he was seen as a low-performing Marine, said Tanner, who was also held back.

“He was a little strange,” Tanner said. “And I think his seniors didn’t like him.”

A short time later, Long deployed instead with Golf Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment. In Afghanistan, the 1,000-Marine battalion saw little action compared with others during a troop surge from 2010 to 2012, Marines said.

“It was fairly quiet,” said Jeremy Soliz, who was part of the deployment. “We were warriors, but we acted more like policemen. We built roads, built canals, tried to help people.”

The only casualty in the battalion died by suicide after being hazed by other Marines. Even so, Marines said, firefights and hidden bombs were a constant threat. Pettiford, who was Long’s roommate, said troops saw the Afghan police officers and army troops they were training blown to pieces by improvised explosives. On Long’s birthday in 2011, Pettiford said, his outpost was hit by rockets.

“Every time you walked outside the wire, you wondered if you were going to get your legs blown off,” he said.

Records show Long earned the Combat Action Ribbon, given to Marines who have engaged the enemy. Nothing in his record indicates that he was wounded, or punished for misconduct. He was honorably discharged in 2013.

After the Marines, Long appeared to readjust, Pettiford said. He studied sports medicine at California State University, Northridge, and was a fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He always seemed in high spirits when Pettiford checked in. Blake Winnett, 35, a set builder who lived with Long in two different houses, said that Long spent a lot of time studying and on the computer in his room while he was attending CSUN. He also had a carefree side.

“He was a raver, essentially, and liked to go to underground dance events,” Winnett said. “The sweatier the better.”

But there were also signs of trouble. Long was hospitalized from a motorcycle crash about three years ago, Pettiford said.

“A combat deployment creates such a high level of stimulus and afterward you struggle to fill it,” Pettiford said. “That’s why guys wreck their motorcycles. They are searching for that intensity they lost.”

Long also dropped out of college, according to the university. In a post on an online forum, first reported by CNN, he said about sports medicine: “I found out a little too late that just wasn’t the job for me. Maybe the ego got the better of me but it took only one time for a 19-year-old D-2 athlete to talk down to me and tell me how to do my job that I realized this wasn’t the career I wanted.” Neighbors said they rarely saw him outside the house.

Hanson, who lives next to the Longs, said Long was quiet.

“He rarely spoke to me, but that didn’t bother me,” he added. “People have their own lives, we’re different ages, different concerns.”

Hanson said he had numerous friends who were Vietnam veterans with whom he used to get together for casual basketball or football games. He motioned to the street in front of his home, now cordoned off with red crime-scene tape.

“We’d spend time together, get air, blow off some steam,” Hanson said of his veteran friends. “It’s not like that now. This guy just kept to himself, probably tried to deal with whatever he had on his own.”