Denver police have arrested an accountant for a shooting at a park on Sunday that left one person wounded.
Ryan Egelston, 28, reportedly told police he first got into an argument with a man because he asked to sit on a park bench where Egelston was sitting, KUSA reported. He said “he thought the man was a pedophile and wanted to touch him.” Egelston said he “spit on the man, pushed him away, and possibly punched him in his lower back” before firing a shot that hit the victim’s bicycle.
After that, Egelston allegedly fired at another person from behind with no provocation whatsoever, striking him in the neck and jaw and leaving him with serious injuries. The victim is expected to survive.
Egelston told police he believed the people he shot at “were somehow involved in psy-ops.”
Witnesses told police that the suspect in the shooting got into a red vehicle and left the scene. Police spotted the vehicle and attempted a traffic stop, but the driver sped off before officers used a PIT maneuver to bring it to a stop.
Police found a handgun in the rear seat. Egelston, who says on his website he is a “certified joy enthusiast” with a “deep passion to preach and teach the Word of God,” was charged with attempted murder.
Egelston appeared on the Christian Kingdom Crossroads podcast last March espousing his views that artificial intelligence was bringing about the end times
“His views were to the extreme, I guess you could say,” Robert Thibodeau, host of the podcoast, told KUSA. “But at the same time, they were his views, and I was asking questions.”
Thibodeau said the shooting surprised him, however.
