Authorities identified the shooter as 36-year-old Seth Aaron Ator from Lorena, Texas, a man who had been fired from his job the morning of the shooting spree.
Before the call, Ator was in the process of being terminated from his job for being rude to other employees at a contracted jobsite, but he became agitated and refused to hand over property belonging to the company.
Ator drove south on JBS Parkway and shot a man in a commercial parking lot in a drive-by style shooting.
Ator turned onto Adams Avenue and stopped his Toyota Camry next to a United States Postal Service-labeled Ram C/V Tradesman.
He drove onto the lawn of a house at the corner of East 38th Street and Walnut Avenue before killing a man inside the home from outside.
While shooting the man, he also injured another person in the area before performing a U-turn in an alleyway and driving back to Walnut Avenue to head south.
Ator made a turn onto Dr. Emmitt Headlee Street and drove east towards the evacuated Cinergy Odessa movie theater.
[19] The day after the shooting, police identified the shooter as 36-year-old Seth Aaron Ator (September 17, 1982[20] – August 31, 2019) of Lorena, Texas.
[25] Another neighbor told the Associated Press that her family had lived near Ator for the past five months and were afraid of him due to his tendency to shoot rabbits in the nighttime and him banging on their door early one morning.
[29] In January 2014, Ator failed a national criminal background check when he tried to purchase a gun; the system flagged him as ineligible because of a prior local court determination that he was mentally unfit.
[30] According to law enforcement officials, Ator subsequently bought the gun used in the shooting via a private sale, without having to go through a background check.
[31][32] On September 1, the FBI said it was executing a search warrant at the suspect's house, located about 20 minutes west of Odessa.
[24] On September 2, at a press conference, FBI agent Christopher Combs said that the perpetrator turned up for work "enraged".
FBI agents attempted to identify and locate the caller, but were unable to do so in the fifteen minutes before the shooting began.
[36] On September 4, The Wall Street Journal and news station KCBD reported that the FBI and law enforcement in Lubbock served a search warrant to a person of interest, suspected of illegally manufacturing and selling the rifle in connection with the shooting.
[37] Investigation showed that the rifle used in the shooting was purchased on October 8, 2016 from Marcus Anthony Braziel, 45, of Lubbock, Texas.
[7][13][40][41] Democrats generally urged more gun restriction laws, while Republicans offered prayers, called for cultural changes, and pointed out mental illness issues.
[45][46] On September 4, Democrats in the Texas House held five press conferences in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and El Paso.
But that doesn’t include a helter-skelter approach that hastily calls for perfunctory votes that divide legislators along party lines.
In response, Donna Howard of the Texas House of Representatives, at a press conference in Austin said: "You know who can build a consensus is the Governor.
If the Governor speaks up and says he will get behind certain legislation, we will have a consensus..."[47] Also on September 4, during a visit with Midland and Odessa city and law enforcement leaders to talk about ways to prevent mass shootings, Cruz spoke with a local news station saying: "Much of my discussions with law enforcer [sic] today was what were the warning signs that we had that this individual had a serious mental illness that posed a danger to himself or to others... What could we have done better to stop this deranged criminal from getting a gun in the first place?
"[48] On September 5, Abbott issued eight executive orders in response to the El Paso and Odessa-Midland mass shootings, in a statement Abbott said: “Texas must achieve several objectives to better protect our communities and our residents from mass shootings, I will continue to work expeditiously with the legislature on laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals, while safeguarding the 2nd Amendment rights of law-abiding Texans.”[49] Marcus Anthony Braziel, 45, of Lubbock, was sentenced to two years in prison in January 2021 for illegally selling the AR-15 style rifle that Seth Aaron Ator used in the shooting.