Ryan Palmeter stopped at different Jacksonville dollar store before racist shooting

The shooter who killed three black people at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida, Saturday once worked at a discount retailer — and stopped at a Family Dollar, where a security guard’s presence caused him to leave just before he carried out what police say was a racially motivated attack.

Ryan Palmeter, 21, who is white, had worked at a Dollar Tree from October 2021 to July 2022, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said Monday.

“Based off what we saw: him stopping off at the Family Dollar and working at a Dollar Tree previously and then him going to Dollar General, that was his intent the entire time,” Waters said.

“Why that store? Still hard to tell.”

Security footage shows Palmeter entering a Family Dollar and leaving minutes later carrying a small shopping bag.

The footage shows that as he reached his car, a security guard pulled into the parking lot and he left, Waters said.

“It doesn’t appear to me that he wanted to face anyone that would cause him any issues. It looks like he wanted to take action at the Family Dollar — that’s what it looks like — and he did not because, I think he got impatient and got tired of waiting,” Waters said.

The latest evidence makes Waters believe Edward Waters University, a small historically black college where the gunman was spotted and asked to leave earlier that day, was not his intended target.

“I don’t believe, looking at that, that EWU was a target,” Waters said, noting that during the brief time Palmeter was near campus, he was parked next to a car with two young African American men inside and did nothing.

Not long after he drove away from the school, he arrived at the Dollar General in the predominantly black New Town neighborhood.

Palmeter, wearing a tactical vest and carrying a Glock pistol and AR-15-style rifle covered in swastikas, killed Angela Michelle Carr, 52, Jerrald Gallion, 29, and Anolt Joseph “AJ” Laguerre Jr., 19.

He fired 11 rounds at Carr as she sat in her car in the store’s parking lot, while Gallion was gunned down as he entered the shop with his girlfriend.

Laguerre worked at the Dollar General and was trying to flee when he was shot and killed.

Palmeter — who turned the gun on himself 11 minutes after his rampage began — acted alone in his racist rampage, authorities said.

Shoppers managed to flee the dollar store through a back door while he chased and shot after them.

He also left behind a suicide note and several racist manifestos on the computer at his parents’ house in Clay County, where he lived, authorities said.

“The manifesto is, quite frankly, the diary of a madman,” Waters said during an earlier briefing. “He was just completely irrational. But with irrational thoughts, he knew what he was doing. He was 100% lucid.”

“This shooting was racially motivated, and he hated black people,” Waters said. 

The guns Palmeter used were purchased legally in April and June of this year — despite Palmeter having been held for emergency mental health evaluation for three days in 2017, though he was released after an examination.

FBI investigators are treating the shooting as a hate crime.

With Post wires