The Washington Navy Yard gunman, Aaron Alexis, reportedly felt that he was racially discriminated against. According to his best friend, Nutpisit Suthamtewakul, 31, who runs the Happy Bowl Thai restaurant, Alexis “had been in the Navy but he was unemployed…He never got angry with us. He was always very nice to us. He had a couple of issues with being black. He felt he hadn’t been treated right, not by the Navy, just generally. He didn’t have a lot of friends – me, my wife and family, and people from temple.”
Alexis was both a devout Buddhist, spending half of each Sunday meditating at a temple in Fort Worth, and a devotee of violent video games. Alexis also supposedly thought he had been “screwed” over a contracting job in Japan last year, and worked at a building near the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center during September 11.