Kalamazoo Shooter Says Uber App Demonically Controlled Him

According to police investigators, James Dalton, 45, the Uber driver accused of randomly shooting eight and killing six people in the Kalamazoo area, said he did so under the demonic mind control of the Uber app on his phone. “It feels like it is coming from the phone itself,” Dalton told the police.

He said that first a pentagram, an inverted five pointed star, would appear on his phone and then a figure he described as the devil would pop up through Uber when he pressed the app button. Dalton described the figure as a “horned cow head or something like that and then it would give you an assignment and it would literally take over your whole body.”

He said that he didn’t aim, and that the demon in the Uber app controlled his arm.

Dalton has been charged with both murder and attempted murder in the Feb. 20 shootings that took place over a five hour period, apparently interspersed with Dalton picking up Uber fares in his blue Chevrolet HHR. He told investigators that at some point during the shooting spree he went home and fired a shotgun into his garden shed, in the direction of what he said was controlling him, apparently to stop it.

The alleged shooter, who was carrying a loaded 9 mm handgun and wearing a bulletproof vest when he was arrested, told officers that he decided not to get into a shootout with them because the color of the Uber app on his phone changed from black to red.

Dalton’s attorney, Eusebio Solis, told a judge at a preliminary examination earlier in March that his client doesn’t seem to understand the case against him, even though Dalton has told police that he understood that he had killed. Solis asked for and was granted an order for Dalton to be evaluated at Michigan’s Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ann Arbor.

Dalton has no reported history of mental illness. So far Uber has not commented on these latest developments. Police say that they doubt that he was inspired by his Uber app.

[Image Source: Kalamazoo County Sheriff’s Office]

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