TCC Shooting at Mexican Pyramid on Columbine’s Anniversary

I dread April 20th every year. It’s not superstition, but pattern recognition. Every year I worry that someone steeped in Columbine worship or that darker corner people call the “True Crime Community” is going to try to make the anniversary mean something again. A lot of the plots that get stopped before they happen are tied to that date. So far, for 27 years, that fear hasn’t fully materialized. Yesterday, though, we came closer than we’ve been in a long time.

Teotihuacan, in Mexico, is one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world. Yesterday, 27-year-old Julio César Jasso opened fire on a crowd of tourists at the UNESCO Heritage Site of the Pyramid of the Moon. He killed a Canadian woman and wounded 13 others, including children, before dying by taking the coward’s way out after a gunfire exchange with police.

Witnesses described confusion turning into panic, people pinned to the ground, and gunfire echoing across a place that’s supposed to be about history, not becoming it. Some thought it was fireworks at first. By the time they realized it wasn’t, people were already running for their lives.

The timing wasn’t an accident. As you probably know, April 20th is the anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre, and it’s a date that carries weight in certain online circles that never let that event go. Authorities say Jasso left behind an AI-generated image of himself posing with the Columbine cowards of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. This is someone trying to insert himself into a lineage, to stand shoulder to shoulder with the people he’s built up in his head.

The t-shirt he wore that said “Disconnect & Self-Destruct,” is another one of those signals. It shows up in the same spaces where Columbine is treated as something to be studied, imitated, and even admired.

When people talk about the so-called True Crime Community in this context, they’re not talking about people who read case files or watch documentaries. They’re talking about a fringe subculture that trades in glorification, where shooters become icons and their crimes get picked apart like fan theories. Columbiners are the most infamous part of that community. They’re people who obsess specifically over Harris and Klebold, sometimes to the point of adopting their language, aesthetics, and twisted worldview.

What makes this case stand out a little more is Jasso’s age. He was 27. In TCC circles, that’s practically senior citizen age. In my experience, most of the people pulled into that orbit are teenagers or young adults who either grow up out of it or move on before they hit their mid-twenties. He would have barely been alive when Columbine happened in 1999. It’s not unheard of for someone that age to still be locked into that mindset, but it’s not the norm either. Most people don’t carry that fixation that far into adulthood.

Reports also say Jasso had a history of Nazi symbolism going back years. That overlap between extremist imagery and mass violence isn’t new, and it keeps showing up. These ideologies don’t always line up neatly, but the obsession with power, destruction, and notoriety tends to rhyme.

Then there’s the uncomfortable cross-border reality. Mexico has strict gun laws on paper, but a significant portion of illegal firearms used there are trafficked from the United States. The weapon might be fired in Mexico, but the pipeline often starts north of the border. That’s part of the story, whether people want to acknowledge it or not.

Much like the recent shootings in Turkey, this feels like another example of something that started in the United States continuing to spread outward. The violent idolization tied to Columbine didn’t stay contained. It metastasized online, detached from geography, and now shows up wherever someone is willing to pick it up and act on it. You can change the country, the language, and the setting, but the underlying script feels painfully familiar.

For 27 years, April 20th has been a date where the worst-case scenario mostly stayed hypothetical. This time, it didn’t stay hypothetical. It just didn’t happen in the place most people expected.

(Sources)