Man murdered wife, shot daughter after becoming obsessed with QAnon
A Michigan man’s obsession with the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory culminated in a Sunday incident in which he murdered his wife and badly injured one of his children, his daughter told The Daily Beast.
Igor Lanis, a 53-year-old resident of the Michigan city of Walled Lake, was killed Sunday by police after he started shooting at them with a shotgun, according to the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office.
Inside Lanis’ house, police found Lanis’ wife, Tina Lanis, dead after being shot four times with a handgun. Lanis also shot his daughter Rachel, 25, in the back and legs with a shotgun during the attack, but she managed to call police and survived. Lanis also killed the family dog, shooting it multiple times.
The sudden violence stunned Lanis’ other daughter, 21-year-old Rebecca Lanis, who was at a friend’s birthday party during the murder.
Rebecca Lanis told The Daily Beast that her father became obsessed with QAnon and other conspiracy theories in 2020, consuming huge amounts of online videos and following far-right figures like InfoWars’s Alex Jones.
According to his daughter, Igor Lanis was a car designer with no history of violence. She described her parents as once “extremely loving,” but her father changed after Donald Trump lost 2020.
“He had a sense of reality,” Rebecca Lanis said. “But then after 2020, when Trump lost, he started going down these crazy rabbit holes.”
That year, Lanis became fascinated by QAnon and the idea that Joe Biden stole the election.
“It’s a very big contributor to what happened,” Rebecca Lanis said of her father’s QAnon beliefs. [Continue reading…]