DA releases excerpts from Winthrop shooting suspect’s hateful writings

Prosecutors on Wednesday released chilling excerpts from the diary of 28-year-old Nathan Allen that revealed the depths of his violent racism days before he fatally shot two Black people in their 60s in Winthrop and was himself fatally shot by a Winthrop police sergeant.

“Over the last eleven days the community has come together to mourn the tragic loss of Staff Sergeant [Ramona] Cooper and Trooper [David] Green, honoring the heroes that they are,” Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins said in a statement accompanying her office’s release of the writings, adding that Allen’s family is also mourning and was blindsided by the revelations of his hateful beliefs.

Authorities said State Police are continuing to review the volumes of extremist literature Allen read “with frequency” in the months preceding his shooting rampage on June 26. In addition, Rollins’s office said, troopers have recovered many of Allen’s journals.

Rollins noted in her statement that the Allen family has cooperated with investigators.

“The Allen family — including Nathan’s parents, sibling, wife, and her parents — have met with our investigative team at every request and have cooperated at each turn,” Rollins said. “Further, there has been no indication or evidence that the Allen family was aware of Nathan’s intent or apparent ideologies.”

In entries he wrote in a volume entitled “The Allen Diaries” two nights before the killings, Allen called racism “healthy and natural,” adding that holding it in is “bad for you,” according to the statement. He also expressed violent hatred of Black people in additional writings, the statement said, often using a slur and referring at one point to white people as “apex predators” who are “waking up.”

In one entry two nights before the murders, the statement said, Allen wrote that he hoped he could convince his wife to come “to the truth or her to me. But I [expletive] doubt it. When will it all pop off?”

Winthrop Police Chief Terence Delehanty said Wednesday that Allen’s racist belief system “has no home here” and stressed that Allen was not a Winthrop native.

“This is despicable. The ideology’s despicable, and we all have to speak out against it,” Delehanty said, according to video broadcast by WHDH-TV. “That’s the only way we’re going to heal and the only way we’re going to move forward.”

Delehanty did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Globe on Wednesday evening.

Robert Trestan, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League New England, reviewed excerpts of Allen’s diary and said it was “terrifying to see the amount of vitriol and hate that inspired this man to commit what is essentially an act of terror.”

“The fact that he was creating his own diary is also an indication that he wanted to potentially inspire and incite other people to commit similar acts,” Trestan said in an interview. “This is a common tactic that white supremacists embrace, by creating writings, manifestoes, and diaries that they know will live long after they are gone.”

Trestan said Allen’s writings reminded him of Keith Luke, a self-described neo-Nazi who was convicted of murdering a man and a woman and raping and critically wounding another woman in Brockton in 2009. Luke died in 2014 after what officials described as an apparent suicide attempt at the Souza-Baranowski Center in Shirley.

“It’s a similar situation, where he was under the radar, he had a written manifesto, he was inspired by . . . books and materials from white supremacy, and he went out to commit an act of hate,” he said.

Rollins noted that the slayings in Winthrop came days before a rabbi was viciously stabbed outside a Jewish day school in Brighton.

“The investigation into the murders in Winthrop and the violent attack in Brighton are ongoing,” Rollins said. “Our freedom to live and thrive as our full and authentic selves is precious. Who you are, love, pray to, or identify as, is fundamental. It must be fiercely protected, both by those of us in law enforcement who have the ability through our prosecutions to hold offenders accountable and by the people in the community who show up, stand up, and demonstrate by their presence and numbers that love overcomes hate, understanding overcomes fear, and light overcomes darkness.”

Trestan said the violence in Winthrop and in Brighton is part of a chilling trend of racist and antisemitic attacks.

“We’re living through a time now where people are operationalizing their hatred through violence,” Trestan said. “They’re literally leaving their homes and going out and targeting people simply because of who they are, whether it’s their religion or their skin color. That means that everyone is vulnerable, and these are not random criminal acts. These are targeted acts of violence.”

Globe correspondent Jeremy C. Fox contributed to this report. Material from prior Globe stories was also used.