Hey, gang, and welcome to Sunday, August 9, 2026. Books, rice pudding, and hand-holding are all on the docket, so it's a gentler Sunday than most.
My calendar says it's Book Lovers Day, Rice Pudding Day, Hold Hands Day, Melon Day, Bowling Day, Betty Boop Day, and Garage Sale Day. Grab a book, hold someone's hand, eat some melon, and if the garage sale doesn't pan out, there's always bowling to fall back on. (Do bowling alley employees go on strike? Never mind.)
Today in History:
1814: The Creek Nation signs the Treaty of Fort Jackson, ceding 22 million acres of land to the United States and opening a massive wave of white settlement into Alabama.
1842: The Webster-Ashburton Treaty is signed, formally establishing the U.S.-Canada border east of the Rocky Mountains, through the Great Lakes to the Lake of the Woods.
1854: Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden, chronicling his two years, two months, and two days of deliberate simple living near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.
1859: Otis Tufts patents the first passenger elevator, featuring automatic doors and benches powered by a steam engine.
1892: Thomas Edison receives a patent for a two-way telegraph capable of sending messages simultaneously in opposite directions on a single wire.
1907: The first Boy Scout encampment concludes at Brownsea Island in southern England after 10 days and 20 boys, effectively launching the global Scouting movement.
1910: Alva J. Fisher receives a patent for an electric washing machine he names "Thor," using a small motor to turn a metal drum and keep clothes from bunching.
1930: Betty Boop makes her cartoon debut in Dizzy Dishes, appearing first as a French poodle cabaret singer before becoming fully human over a year later.
1944: The U.S. Forest Service and the Wartime Advertising Council release the first posters featuring Smokey Bear.
1969: Followers of Charles Manson murder actress Sharon Tate and four others at her Los Angeles home.
1974: Richard Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to resign from office, and Gerald Ford is sworn in as his successor within the hour.
Birthdays Today Include: Whitney Houston, singer and actor ("I Wanna Dance with Somebody") (The Bodyguard); Anna Kendrick, actor and singer (Pitch Perfect); Gene Luen Yang, cartoonist and graphic novelist (American Born Chinese); Melanie Griffith, actor (Working Girl); Deion Sanders, NFL Hall of Famer and coach.
* * *
Today's piece is a bit more serious than you longtimereaders will expect. My journalistic instincts are that the subject doesn't allow for much snark, I'm afraid. Sometimes they come out like that. Anyway, let's dive in:
It's now been eight days since 24-year-old Chad Williams walked up to a brand-new In-N-Out Burger in Twin Falls, Idaho — the place had barely finished its grand opening, having only cracked its doors on July 24 — and turned a fast-food parking lot into a crime scene. He killed three people, including employee Ashley Garibay, and wounded seven more before putting a bullet in himself after roughly 90 minutes of chaos. Wikipedia has assembled the fullest timeline so far, and it's worth reading in full if you can stomach it.
Here's what we actually know, stripped of the speculation everyone's been layering on top of it:
Williams pulled up to the drive-thru payment window and shot Garibay first. He then pulled forward, parked, got out, and shot Christopher Claunch, who was sitting in another car, minding his own business, ordering a burger like everyone else that day. Former Twin Falls police officer and former Idaho state trooper Austin James Scott ran toward the gunfire to confront him — Williams shot and wounded Scott too, forcing him to retreat. Williams then doubled back to the payment window and opened fire on employees who were trying to keep Garibay alive. His handgun jammed at some point in all this, so he calmly walked back to his own car, grabbed a rifle, and picked up right where he left off. It took an armed bystander named Lane Koehn, along with return fire from other citizens, to finally drive him off. He shot himself before police ever got a hand on him.
What we still don't have, eight days later, is the "why." And that gap is where everyone's imagination has gone to work overtime.
Police Chief Matthew Hicks says detectives are confident Williams acted alone and that his family is cooperating fully with the investigation. Beyond that, the well runs dry.
Williams attended the College of Southern Idaho from 2022 to 2023 and left without a credential — he'd also held a student government position there, one from which he was booted in February 2023, roughly 10 months before he stopped showing up at CSI altogether. Nobody's saying why he got the boot, and nobody's saying why he left. Funny how that particular detail hasn't made it into any official statement yet. A former dorm hallmate who considered Williams a genuine friend, one Elijah Moseley, called him "an introvert" and "a pretty chill guy" who never once seemed alarming. Which tells us exactly nothing, as I dug into a few days back — plenty of perfectly ordinary introverts never shoot up a drive-thru, and plenty of people who eventually do exactly that spend years looking completely unremarkable right up until the moment they don't.
In the lack of information, I have a couple theories that are admittedly as thin as the data is, but I'll toss 'em out anyway:
The timing — going from handgun to jammed handgun to full rifle, mid-attack, without hesitation — makes me wonder if this started as something absurdly small. The place had only been open a matter of days. New staff, new systems, plenty of room for a botched order.
Thing is, if Williams snapped over something as petty as a screwed-up burger from a crew that hadn't found its rhythm yet, that alone doesn't explain a man showing up already armed and ready to escalate to a rifle. Something else had to be sitting underneath that, whether it was medication, a breakdown building for weeks, or some other pressure nobody's disclosed. Call it a hunch, and weigh it accordingly.
I'll also cop to my own first instinct, which came up before any of all that, since I try not to pretend I didn't have one.
Given the run of recent shooters where the shooter was trans and on meds, and where that detail eventually surfaced days into coverage, my gut went there initially, too. At this point, I'm not ruling it out entirely, but nothing in the reporting on Williams points that direction, and the longer this drags on without that detail surfacing, the less I'm inclined to keep leaning on it.
At this point, I find myself circling a different, equally unproven idea instead: that Williams may have known his first victim, Ashley Garibay. If the pictures do her justice, she was a rather pretty girl, I must say. The idea here is that she was specifically targeted rather than randomly chosen. That's speculation and nothing more, and I'll say so plainly, rather than dress it up as something sturdier.
Finally, I observe that In-N-Out opened a new place in Colorado as well, back in 2020, which prompted lines of 12 to 14 hours. In-N-Out has been going through a fairly large expansion over the last few years. In-N-Out opened its first two Colorado locations — one in Aurora, one in Colorado Springs — on Friday, November 20, 2020. The Aurora location, near a shopping mall, saw demand so extreme that the drive-thru line stretched 1.5 to 2 miles, wrapped around the mall property twice, and backed up nearby highways. Aurora police initially estimated a 12-hour wait, then revised it up to 14 hours. I've seen that phenom myself during a local opening of a Chick-fil-A, which was so huge it required three local police cars to keep traffic moving off the main road the place was on. Estimates in that case were a couple of hours. Which leads me here: The In-N-Out in Twin Falls had just opened a few days before the incident, which makes me wonder if the situation there wasn't similar in its drive-thru. Interesting that this didn't get mentioned.
I ran all of this past a friend of mine, a detective with a department here in New York state, over some adult beverages last night. His read matched what I'd already suspected: the "quiet, chill introvert" description tells investigators almost nothing useful. It's exactly the kind of thing you hear about someone who never threw up a red flag — which is precisely what makes cases like this such a slog. No visible warning signs doesn't mean no grievance was building. It just means whatever was building never made it past the surface where casual acquaintances could see it.
Honestly, I find myself in the same position I found myself in recently, when speaking about what had been going on with Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). I don't like being forced into speculation based on small threads. But, as with that case, it's what we have.
Importantly, Police Chief Hicks himself has hinted there's more sitting on his desk than he's currently releasing, saying flatly that some details "cannot be released at this stage" without compromising the investigation. Translation: they likely know considerably more than they're telling any of us right now. Until that changes, everything above the confirmed timeline is exactly what I've labeled it — educated guessing, nothing more, and anyone presenting it otherwise is selling you something.
I get the impression that when this case is finally closed, it'll be more twisted than what we all thought, including myself. But for the meantime, I don't mind telling you that I'm uncomfortable with the open ends here.
I've got crawlers going on the subject, and when I know more I'll write about it.
Thought for Today:
2020: The science is settled. Trust the science
2021: I am science!
2022: Sorry you lost your job for not trusting the science.
2023: We've recalled the vaccine.
2026: I plead the Fifth.
VIP members: Let's hear your thoughts in the comments. Your voice matters.
I'm glad you're here today, gang. Have a great Sunday. I'll see you here tomorrow.
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
Help us hold these leftists accountable and expose their obstruction. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member