Steve, can we explore together why it matters whether there was some element of "racial bias" involved in this case?

Suppose we could magically scan his brain and find that 18% of his motivation was indirectly linked to an Asian fetish (as in, without that fetish, he might have chosen a slightly different set of parlors to shoot up and thus killed only 3 Asians and 4 non-Asians).

How would that knowledge help us improve the world? (I AM NOT suggesting that you or any other reader think it would, I am asking whether you or they have any mechanisms for improving the world which have not occurred to me).

For the vengeance oriented, they might use it to add a racial hate crime to his charges and consider that in itself a positive. I doubt his punishment would be any worse tho, so I don't even see how that accomplishes anything.

But do we imagine that knowing that a hate crime charge might be added (based on the magic brain scanner), is going to inhibit somebody who is ready to kill a dozen people (the 8 he did and others in the porn industry he didn't get to) and who already knows they are likely to die in the process or through execution if caught? Does anybody think that there would be a deterrence effect?

Would knowing that this statistically infinestimal sample of deeply warped humanity (1 person) did or did not have a racial bias component lodged among the catastrophic dysfunctions of his mind going to help us prevent future occurrences in some other way? Would it inform a policy which would improve the world? Would "don't fetishize Asian women" signs in every classroom of America have a measurable effect on the frequency of such deranged crimes?

And that's the best case - with the magic brain scan. The real world will be a lot more ambiguous.

We have the killer saying it was not about race. What is his incentive to lie? It's not like we're going to say, "OK, then you are not in any serious trouble then, we'll treat this as a minor crime" if we believed him. But your correspondent is speculating that even if the killer didn't consciously commit the crimes because of racial hatred ("hate crime"), perhaps some kind of lesser racial bias was unconsciously involved. That's a nearly unfalsifiable hypothesis and again - how does it help society to promote an unverifiable speculation?

Other than being used to reinforce some ideology, I don't see any value to the kind of speculation your correspondent wants to make. I don't see any mechanism by which society could be materially improved.

It was a horrible crime, and we'd all like to see it never happen again over the next century; or more realistically, for such crimes to become even more rare than they are. We could talk about gun restrictions, or more mental health support, or easier routes to involuntary commitment, or various other ways to try to accomplish that.

But trying to parse out how he might have unconsciously have had some iota of indirect racial bias influencing his choice of victim (say, if he fetishized Asian sex workers rather than just being attracted to them), seems closer to debating how many angels can stand on the head of a pin, than to rational discussion of improving society in meaningful ways. I see nothing actionable and helpful therein.