Michigan man who was obsessed with Q-Anon fatally shot by police after killing wife, family dog

A Michigan man who was allegedly fascinated with the Q-Anon conspiracy theory movement was killed in a shootout with law enforcement officers over the weekend shortly after he gunned down his wife and dog, police said.

Law enforcement responded to a call around 4 a.m. on Sunday from a woman who claimed she was shot by her father. When they arrived on the scene on Glenwood Drive in Walled Lake, they were immediately met by the suspect, 53-year-old Igor Lanis, who opened fired on deputies with a Remington 870 pump action shotgun.

Lanis’ gunfire struck “a car an officer was behind and the residence behind him,” although no one “was injured from those shots,” the sheriff’s office said Monday. It prompted a Walled Lake police officer and an Oakland County Sheriff’s deputy to return fire, striking and killing Lanis, according to authorities.

The 25-year-old woman who placed the 911 call was spotted at one point attempting to crawl from the home.

“They dragged her to safety,” police said. “She stated that her dad shot her and her mother.”

The woman was hospitalized in critical condition, though she was described as “stable” following emergency surgery.

“Currently, the daughter has been stabilized, but obviously she has super traumatic injuries from a shotgun blast to her back and legs,” Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard said during a news conference.

Officers also discovered the suspect’s wife and the family dog dead inside the home.

The 56-year-old woman was “shot multiple times in the back, and it appears that she was also attempting to flee out of the front door,” according to authorities. The family’s pet, a Great Pyrenees, was similarly “shot multiple times.”

Police, who do not know what triggered the shooting, did not identify the victims. But the suspect’s other daughter, 21-year-old Rebecca Lanis, told the Detroit News that her father faced a decline in mental health in recent years. She blamed it on his growing obsession with internet conspiracy theories and extremism, which was seemingly sparked by Donald’s Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election.

“I think that he was always prone to (mental issues), but it really brought him down when he was reading all those weird things on the internet,” she said, specifically referencing Q-Anon, a political conspiracy theory movement that emerged in 2017.

Subscribers to the theory believe that former President Trump was waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping pedophiles in government as well as in business and the media.

“It’s really so shocking but it really can happen to anybody,” Lanis told the Detroit News on Sunday night. “Right-wing extremism is not funny, and people need to watch their relatives and if they have guns, they need to hide them or report them or something because this is out of control.”