Mass murderer Aaron Alexis carved the phrase “Better off this way” into the stock of his shotgun before embarking on his deadly shooting spree at the Washington Navy Yard, it was revealed on Wednesday.
Alexis also scratched the words “My ELF weapon” on the firearm he used during Monday’s rampage, in which the homicidal maniac killed 12 victims before being gunned down by cops, The Washington Post reported.
The information came from two law-enforcement sources who said officials don’t yet know what Alexis meant by the bizarre etchings, but are hoping they will help explain what prompted the bloodbath, according to the paper.
According to the report, ELF can stand for “extremely low frequency” and can refer to weather or communications efforts.
Meanwhile, chilling new details from eyewitnesses emerged about Alexis’ bloody rampage inside the Navy Yard’s Building 197.
The deranged gunman, the witnesses told the paper, randomly fired at anyone he encountered as terrified workers hid under their desks or desperately barricaded themselves inside their offices.
Navy Capt. Mark Vandroff was meeting with his staff when the bloodbath began.
“I heard the gunshots,” he told the paper. “Someone screamed and said there was a shooter on the loose and to ‘Lock the doors! Lock the doors!’”
A person triggered the fire alarm and some workers began running while others tried to hide, Vandroff said.
“People were fleeing into offices,” Vandroff said, and trying “to get another layer of protection” by barricading their doors with office furniture.
Teams of AR-15-toting DC cops were already swarming the building, and would ultimately engage in repeated firefights with Alexis, who would pick up two-semi-automatic handguns from base security guards during the assault.
The madman had concealed himself behind a wall on a fourth-floor atrium that looked down on a common area crowded with workers and opened fire.
“He had the advantage, and no one knew where he was,” an official told the paper. “He was moving. It was fish in a barrel.”
Greg Dade heard a “pop-pop” from his office on the second floor.
“We heard some rapid fire,” said Dade, a Hewlett-Packard employee working as a contractor at the yard.
He and a co-worker left their office and tried to run — only to hear a burst of gunfire nearby.
“We could smell the sulfur type of smell. You could just see it and smell it,” he said, adding that he and his colleague quickly fled back to their office. “What would you do, continue down the hall not knowing?”
Another worker sent Vandroff a text saying he was hiding with colleagues in an office cubicle.
But Vandroff heard nothing from another office where his friend Mike Arnold was working.
“We didn’t know if something bad — or not bad — happened to them,” Vandroff said, the paper reported.
Capt. Christopher Mercer heard screaming, and the gunfire was getting closer as Alexis methodically made his way through the building.
The gunman approached Arnold’s office, and blasted the veteran shipbuilder in the chest with the shotgun without uttering a single word.
Across the hallway, Mercer and three colleagues closed the door and barricaded themselves in as Alexis shot through the door.
“He set up camp right in front of my office,” Mercer told the paper. “He kept reloading and firing at cubicles. Later, when he came back, I could see his shadow through the glass pane in my door.”
The coldblooded psycho ultimately made his way down to the building’s lobby, where he shot a security guard dead, grabbed his 9 mm handgun and dumped the shotgun on the floor.
With the heavily armed cops now flooding the building, he ran back up to the third floor, where Vandroff and the others were still barricaded in his office, and started firing the handgun.
“There was one shot that was very close. There were bullet holes in the wall of the conference room where we were hiding,” Vandroff told the paper.
The end came when Alexis peeked around a partition on the third floor and was felled by a barrage of police bullets to the head.
Colleagues later told Vandroff that “Mike [Arnold] got hit,” one of the 12 people killed in the rampage, the paper reported.