A gunman wearing a mask and a tactical vest killed three people at a Florida Dollar General store on Saturday in the Jacksonville sheriff said was a “racially motivated” shooting.

Two men and a woman were killed, police said, all of them Black.

Sheriff T.K. Waters said the shooter, a white man in his 20s who lived with his parents in Clay County, “wanted to kill Black people.”

The gunman, who has not been positively identified, carried a Glock handgun and a AR-15 style rifle into the store and killed himself after shooting the three people. No one else was injured.

Photographs of the weapons showed they were decorated with swastikas.

Waters told reporters that the gunman left Clay County for Jacksonville shortly after 11:30 a.m. and texted his father at 1:18 p.m. to “check his computer.” The parents called police about a half an hour later, but by then the shooting had started.

The parents found three manifestos on their son’s computer — one to his parents, one to the media, and one to federal agents. The manifestos “detailed the shooter’s disgusting ideology of hate,” Waters said.

“Plainly put, this shooting was racially motivated and he hated Black people,” the sheriff said. “He wanted to kill ‘n******.’ That’s the one and only time that I will use that word.”

According to WJXT, the gunman was seen on the campus of nearby Edward Waters University, a historically Black school, where he was seen putting on the tactical vest, just before the shooting. Campus security tried to catch the man, but were unable to do so.

FBI Special Agent in Charge Sherri E. Onks said that the FBI had “opened a federal civil rights investigation and will pursue this incident as a hate crime.”

Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan, who came to the crime scene in person, said she was “heartbroken.”

“This is a community that has suffered again and again,” she said. “So many times, this is where we end up. It’s something that should not and must not continue to happen.”

Both the mayor and the sheriff noted the community-wide heartbreak and pledged to do everything in their power to stop the spread of “this type of hate.”

Asked by reporters if the gunman targeted specific people, Waters said there was no indication that was true.

“He targeted a group of people, and that’s Black people,” he said. “That was very clear.”

Waters said his office would provide more information as it comes available but for now, “I wanted to let you know exactly what his intentions were.”

The shooting came on the anniversary of the 2018 mass shooting at a video game tournament in Jacksonville, and Deegan said that the gunman referenced that shooting in one of his manifestos.

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[Featured image: Residents talk with Jacksonville police officers near the scene of a mass shooting at a Dollar General store, Saturday, Aug. 26, 2023, in Jacksonville, Fla. (AP Photo/John Raoux)]