Before he moved to Washington DC for a job, Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis spent a lot of time at a Buddhist meditation center called Wat Busaya Dhammavanaram in White Settlement, Texas, which is just a few miles west of Fort Worth.
Twenty five miles north east of the meditation center is a large Buddhist Monastery called Wat Buddharatanaram (also known as Wat Keller). You can see a Google map of the two locations here. In 2012, Alexis participated in an event called Sart Day at the Monastery. Sart Day is a day each fall in which Thai people remember the dead through the practice of Buddhist rituals:
There is also a video clip of the event in which Alexis can be seen walking with the crowd.
Wednesday the Daily Beast’s Pete Freedman reported a different angle on Alexis’ interest in Buddhism. According to a friend who worked with Alexis “He was very much into Asian women. But especially Thai women.” In fact, Alexis and his friend met at an event at the Wat Keller monastery, though it’s not clear from the Daily Beast story if it is the same one depicted above.
The Beast also taled to Alexis’ former boss at the Happy Bowl Thai restaurant who says “he tried to pick up Thai girls all the time.”
Alexis had spent 45 days in Thailand earlier this year where he reportedly spent a lot of time at massage parlors and met a Thai woman whom he asked to marry him and move to the U.S. She declined and Alexis later claimed she had said she “didn’t like black people.”
[h/t @morgenr who discovered the photos]
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