On a Saturday evening in February, a 45-year-old Uber driver and father of two named Jason Dalton got into his car, left his home near Kalamazoo, Michigan, and began shooting people. But the strangest, most unfathomable thing about the night that Dalton killed and killed again is what he did in between.
JASON DALTON began this particular Saturday—February 20, 2016—by doing nothing at all unusual. While his wife of 20 years went out with their 15-year-old son and their 10-year-old daughter, Dalton, 45, took their German shepherd, Mia, for a walk, then ran errands for a couple of hours with a friend, Brian. Afterward, he told Brian he might take a nap, then go to work. Dalton was an insurance loss adjuster in Kalamazoo, Michigan, but less than two weeks earlier he had also started doing some driving for Uber in his off time. The Daltons were doing fine, but he liked the idea of making some extra money. The plan was to take his family to Disney World.
It looked like another ordinary day in the life of an ordinary man in an ordinary part of America. Except that on this day, for reasons that Jason Dalton would later struggle to explain, Kalamazoo would be terrorized by a man driving around town and shooting people, apparently at random. And the person doing the shooting would turn out to be an Uber driver named Jason Dalton.
As different as one mass shooting may be from another, we have become primed to expect certain patterns. First, the violence. Then, the explanation. It’s never a sufficient explanation, of course, but generally, within a day or two, we learn of some kind of motive or circumstance that acted as a trigger. Whether radical Islam, anti-cop vengeance, suicidal depression, or virulent misogyny, an explanation swiftly emerges to help us understand. And then we wait to hear about all the warning signs that were missed, the clues that, if only recognized or heeded at the time, could have prevented this bloodshed.
But what if one day a man became a mass killer and there were no real clues at all about why in the life he’d lived beforehand? Could such a person exist? In the aftermath, as everyone struggled to comprehend the chaos Jason Dalton had caused, that was exactly what those closest to him suggested was the case. Brian, the man whom Dalton would characterize to the police as his best friend, said that during the hours they spent together that day, Dalton had been “a little more quiet” than usual, enough that Brian asked if anything was wrong. Dalton said no. He remembered Dalton asking him if he was interested in driving for Uber as well, but Brian told his friend he was too busy. Nothing about those hours gave Brian any hint what was coming.
Afterward, Dalton’s wife, Carole, and his parents hired a lawyer to speak for them, and the lawyer’s message was that they were baffled: “They’re thinking like everybody else, Why?… Certainly they’ve looked inward as a family to see whether there was anything that would have been an indicator that Jason was capable of something like this, and we’ve got nothing to offer.”
The lawyer also shared this: Two days before it happened, Carole did notice that her husband seemed a little down and had asked him about it. He told her that he was just tired from all the driving.
That’s all she had. He was tired.
WHEN DALTON went out that afternoon to pick up Uber fares in his silver Chevy Equinox, he also brought along the family dog, Mia. His first fare of the day, a female college student, refused to get in the car because of Mia, but the local man he picked up just after 4 P.M., Matt Mellen, was okay with it. Mellen thought it a bit weird, but it was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, so he figured maybe they’d just been for a walk. “And I like animals,” Mellen explained. “Doesn’t bother me.” So he got in the front passenger seat. Mellen was headed from the edge of downtown Kalamazoo to a friend’s house to pick up his car, which he’d left there after a birthday party the previous night. He and Dalton even chatted a little to begin with. Small talk. Nothing unusual.
After they’d driven a short while, Dalton received a phone call. He was using Bluetooth, so Mellen could hear the call, though he wasn’t really paying attention and wasn’t even quite sure if the voice he heard was male or female, adult or child. Anyway, they didn’t talk for long.
That was when the universe abruptly shifted.
“He hung up,” said Mellen, “and he floored it. He hammered the gas pedal. He just started driving crazy.”
Later, there would be much speculation about this phone call, the call that seemed to set Dalton off. For a while, the popular assumption was that the caller must have been his wife: Their relationship must’ve been failing, and an incendiary moment must have enraged him. And as it turned out, the call did indeed come from her phone—but it wasn’t Carole on the line, it was their son. Dalton had called a little earlier as she and their children were sitting down to eat at Wings Etc.; their son had answered (he was playing games on the phone when his father called) and they chatted about his drivers’-ed class. Then—the call that came during Mellen’s journey—Carole had asked their son to call back to check whether Dalton wanted them to pick up some food for him. What might have seemed like a crucial moment was actually a brief, banal call from his teenage son about a chicken dinner.
Whatever the real trigger, Dalton’s behavior became unhinged. He sped into an oncoming-traffic lane, blew through a stop sign, and violently sideswiped a Ford Taurus. But, as he did so, he reacted as though nothing had happened.
“Dude, you hit that car!” Mellen shouted at him. “You just hit that car!”
“I didn’t hit anything,” Dalton replied, with eerie calm, and accelerated onward.
“I was like, ‘Bullshit!’ ” says Mellen. “And then I was just, like, pleading for him to stop the vehicle so I could get out.”
But Dalton wouldn’t stop. He shot through some more lights and repeatedly swerved onto the wrong side of the road. In the back, Mia got down on the floor and hid. And yet the whole time, Dalton showed no outward signs that anything unusual was happening.
“I was, ‘Please just let me out! Please just let me out!’ ” says Mellen. “And he was, ‘Well, don’t you need a ride to your friend’s house?’ I was, ‘Not anymore! Let me out! Let me out!’ And he refused to let me out.”
By then, they’d passed the correct turn, so Mellen started indicating other houses, saying that’s where he had to go: “Pointing out random houses so he would slow down.” Finally, halfway down a quiet stretch of Iroquois Trail, Dalton slammed on the brakes and asked again where Mellen’s friend lived; Mellen took advantage of the moment to leap out. “The worst ride I’ve ever had in my life, that’s for sure.”
Kacey Black was having a cigarette with her husband outside their house on the corner of Iroquois Trail, enjoying the fine weather, when, amid the loud screeching of Dalton’s braking and acceleration, they saw Mellen tumble out of Dalton’s car. Dazed, Mellen told them what had happened. “I was, ‘Am I having a mental breakdown? Did that really just happen? What the hell was that? What the fuck just happened?’ ” Black called 911, describing the silver Chevy SUV, and an Uber driver throwing out a passenger, but she didn’t feel they grasped the extremity of what she’d seen. “They basically just blew me off,” she says. “They said, ‘Okay, well, we’ll report that.’ They sounded like they didn’t even believe me.”
Mellen also called 911 as he headed down the road to retrieve his car. He had to tell the story three times as he was transferred to different jurisdictions, but each time he clearly identified the man as an Uber driver. “I just wanted to report it,” he told them, “because I don’t want somebody to get hurt.”
Back home, Mellen called his fiancée, and at 5:33 she posted a warning for their friends on Facebook about an Uber driver named Jason, using his Uber photo:
“Attention kzoo peeps!!! This uber driver named JASON drives a silver Chevy Equinox is NOT a safe ride!… Despite Matt pleading with this driver to pull over he refused.… He was acting completely normal throughout all of this erratic driving!!… Hoping this man will be arrested or hospitalized soon if he has a medical condition causing his behavior.”
After Mellen escaped from his car, Jason Dalton sped home. When he arrived, he went inside and drank a glass of water, then went down to the basement and prepared his guns, filling up the magazines. By the time he set off back out into the world, he was carrying a loaded Glock 9-mm semi-automatic pistol and he was wearing a bulletproof vest under his jacket. Around the time when he headed back onto the Kalamazoo streets, Dalton also called his wife. He wanted to swap his damaged car with a Hummer they owned, but that was parked at his parents’ house (they were away for the winter in Florida) and his wife had the keys.
When her phone rang, she was in the parking lot of Sam’s Club with their kids, loading up the car. Their son answered and relayed the message; Carole said she’d meet him at her parents’ house.
But Dalton didn’t go straight there. Instead, he accepted a new fare.
After Jason Dalton was captured, the word coming out of the jail was that he had in some way acknowledged his role in the murders. He was variously described by police as “quasi-cooperative,” “pretty matter-of-fact,” “a hard read,” “polite, meek, and mild,” “very even-tempered,” and “not upset about anything.” But he was also said to have shown little emotion or remorse, and the clear impression was that he had offered nothing close to an explanation. As the local under-sheriff, Paul Matyas, put it: “He’s not particularly saying.”
Two days later, when the public finally got a look at Dalton—on live video streamed from the jail to the courtroom as the charges were read to him, a process that took nearly ten minutes—it was hard to read anything at all on his face. Blank? Stoic? Dazed? Eerily composed? Any could describe how he seemed. He spoke only one substantive sentence, after the judge asked if he had anything to say.
“I would prefer,” he said, “just to remain silent.”
This silence left everyone in limbo. But the fact that nobody could say for sure why this had happened hardly stopped people. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the Internet has given everyone the means to fill it.
And so over the next few days, all of the following explanations would be offered, often with great conviction, to explain what Jason Dalton had done: mental illness, family breakdown, withdrawal from antidepressants, “maybe a spooky demon possessed him,” he’d been fired, he was a sleeper agent activated by a phone call, he was coming down from meth, he was sexually frustrated, he was disappointed by Marco Rubio’s poor showing in New Hampshire, it was a primal expression of free will, it was being a fat man denied his lunch break, high levels of lead in his blood, Chantix anti-smoking pills, Big Pharma, grief over the death of Justice Scalia, a brain tumor, elevator music, money problems, and Beyoncé’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl. His behavior was said to be, variously, the fault of Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg, liberals in general, too many guns in America, too few guns in America, Uber in general, Uber’s lax hiring policies, Uber’s low pay rates, Mossad, and the Illuminati.
Do something that seems unfathomable, then sit there and say nothing, and a nation’s splintered psyche will be imprinted upon you.
Dashboard camera footage shows police leading Dalton (left) away from his car, finally putting a stop to his long night of bloodshed.
DEALLEN BLACKBURN, an 18-year-old high school senior, lives in the Meadows townhomes in northeast Kalamazoo. He’d spent most of that Saturday outside, until his girlfriend, Maci, messaged him, asking if he wanted to come hang out at her place in downtown Kalamazoo. He did, so sometime after 5 P.M., she called an Uber to pick him up.
By mistake, Maci initially entered the wrong pickup point—the Meadows townhomes admin office, rather than DeAllen’s address—and so after a while Dalton called her. (It was her name on the Uber account and, subsequent events would suggest, she was the passenger Dalton thought he was picking up.)
“He was like, ‘Hey, I’m lost, can you help me out?’ or whatever,” Maci would recall. “So I gave him directions.” Then, she said, he went silent for about ten minutes. “I was, like, texting him repeatedly. I was, ‘Okay, did you find it?’ or ‘Are you lost still?’ ”
Dalton’s silver car can be seen on the security cameras circling the estate from 5:33 onward, trying but failing to find DeAllen. By chance DeAllen’s guardian, Amy, actually saw Dalton in his vehicle during this period when she went out to her mailbox. She didn’t realize he was there for DeAllen, or she would have said something, but she did notice how on edge he seemed: “He was really aggressive. He’s sitting kind of by the trash can and as I’m coming forward he’s, like, a crazy look in his eye, and as I’m approaching, he stepped on the gas and almost runs into me. My first intent was to throw up the finger—thank God I didn’t.”
Meanwhile, Maci continued to text Dalton. At 5:40 she wrote, “All good?”
Dalton didn’t reply. It was right then, as he looped one more time around the Meadows, that he spotted a 25-year-old woman who was leading five young children, including her daughter, across the grass to the playground. Dalton rolled down his window and asked if she, as she later recalled it, was “Maisie or Misty.”
The woman said no—in fact, her name was Tiana Carruthers—and Dalton momentarily drove off. But then he turned the car around again and headed back. Still sitting in his car, he took out his Glock semi-automatic and pointed it at Carruthers through the driver-side window.
DeAllen was still waiting for his ride when he heard gunshots, out of sight but somewhere nearby.
Maci, meanwhile, was typing out one more text to Dalton: “Are you close?”
In the days afterward, a few scattered news articles purported to offer insight into the mass murderer Jason Dalton. Potentially meaningful details were seized upon and imbued with far more significance than they deserved. Neighbors were quoted saying that Dalton sometimes fired guns out the back of his house. An old insurance co-worker contacted the police and said that when they worked in the same office nearly 15 years earlier, Dalton would get upset when he was challenged by clients. One time he yelled and hung up on a customer, and then paced around his desk. More suggestively, a man named Mark Cottingham, who owned a nearby business, Visions Car & Truck Accessories, detailed a disconcerting interaction with Dalton over a repair the previous September: At times Dalton seemed to have unreasonable anger, but other times he was all sweetness. To Cottingham, it almost seemed like Dalton had a dual personality.
But if Dalton had really been a man on the edge—a swelling river of anger about to burst its banks—you’d have expected 30 similar stories to follow, and 30 more after that. And they didn’t. Taken all together, it was pretty thin stuff.
There was one fact, though, that seemed pretty damning on the surface, and seemed to speak to Dalton’s state of mind that day. The errands he had done in the early afternoon with his friend Brian involved visiting three gun stores. At one of them, Dalton bought an $85 black tactical jacket, which had a chest pocket designed for hiding a handgun. What clearer sign could there be of premeditation, of a man planning a mission, equipping himself?
