Wess Roley, Coeur d’Alene sniper was incel who wanted a girlfriend, had no friends and was estranged from his father along with being expelled from school and evicted for transgressive behavior.
The Coeur D’Alene sniper who shot two firefighters dead last weekend in a deliberate ambush attack, complained about not having a girlfriend, had been previously expelled from school in the 10th grade for making violent threats along with being kicked out by his own father after coming to live with him.
Wess Roley, 20, whose grandfather had previously alluded to his grandson being a troubled loner has since been revealed to have have been embroiled in discord with his own family, former classmates who were ’terrified’ of him along with an obsession with Neo-Nazism which involved him denying the Holocaust ever happening.
The loner had also sought romance but according to a former roommate ‘was not willing’ to do anything to attract a woman in his life.
Roley is alleged to have bullied included gender-fluid kids at his Arizona high school, along with making disturbing neo-Nazi comments and posting Holocaust-denying TikTok videos according to former classmates.
After moving to Idaho in summer 2024 after a year living with his grandfather Dale, 66, in Vinita, Oklahoma, his life spun further out of control – with a former roommate telling the dailymail that he made threatening gang signs, had no friends along with cheating him out of a month’s rent when he was told to move out.
Roley had also fallen out with his father Jason, 39 – a heavily tattooed motorcycle enthusiast whose Facebook page carries several pictures of him in Hell’s Angel gear – who lives in remote Priest River, Idaho, with his second wife Sara, 35, and their two young children.
Things came to a head with the father eventually asking the troubled teen to move out, leading to Roley briefly moving in with a local before being asked by the roommate to move, leading to Roley eventually living out of his car.
‘When he first moved in with me, he was just real quiet,’ said TJ Franks, 28, who lives in Sandpoint, Idaho, 60 miles north of Coeur d’Alene.
‘He didn’t really do a whole lot. He just kind of kept to himself and worked. But then, towards the end of his stay here, we started noticing changes in his behavior.
‘He shaved all his hair off. He was keeping really late hours at night.’
Other difficult behavior included using Franks’s personal items such as his clippers without permission, monopolizing the TV and playing video games into the early morning hours.
According to Franks, Roley – who was living out of his van when he died – didn’t appear to have any friends and frequently complained about wanting a girlfriend.
But he did nothing to get one, instead spending most of his time off taking lonely rambles along the 3.5-mile Mickinnick Trail – telling Franks he felt most at home in the forest.
The pattern is similar to one observed his former classmates in Arizona, with one North Phoenix Prep School graduate telling the dailymail that that he would bully other students – including nicknaming one girl ‘Horse Teeth’ – and having few friends of his own.
More disturbing were his neo-Nazi outbursts and penchant for doodling swastikas and other Nazi symbols in his school notebook.
Coeur D’Alene sniper wanted a girlfriend
‘He was weird,’ recalled the student. ‘At one point, in 10th grade he got a girlfriend who was Jewish.
‘They both were spreading neo-Nazi propaganda. Wess’s notebook was notorious for having doodles of swastikas and satanic symbols in it.
Later in November 2021, the then-10th grader Roley was expelled after threatening both the school and his classmates.
His tattooed, dyed-hair girlfriend also left the school and was never heard from again by classmates.
Asked about Roley’s neo-Nazi past, Franks insisted he had never said anything ‘racial’ in front of him but did say he had shown a consistent disdain for authority.
‘He did say that he has a problem not with authorities but authority,’ Franks reiterated.
‘He has a problem with authority, but he was not a political person. You know, I would talk to him about something that I saw on the news.
‘When I did, he would just kind of laugh and he would say, “it’s all bull crap anyway”.
Ultimately, Roley’s behavior became too much for Franks to tolerate, and he asked him to move out, which he did at the end of January this year.
After that, police say he lived a transient lifestyle and was the subject of several welfare and trespass calls before launching this weekend’s deadly ambush attack.
A local woman, a bible teacher and pastor, previously described in a 6 minute reel meeting Roley last summer while he lived in the wild, she mentioned that Roley exhibited troubling signs and being fascinated with white nationalism along with being curious about meeting women. At one point, Roley had invited to drive her in his car, only for the woman to say she feared getting in the vehicle alone with him.
The shooter’s estranged father, Jason Roley, a former military man, has to date declined to address his relationship with his estranged son, except to insist he had no idea how he came to be fascinated with violence and how he came to acquire the high velocity rifles used during last weekend’s deadly rampage…
