Sandy Huffaker/AFP/GettyPOWAY, California—Nineteen-year-old nursing student John T. Earnest, who was charged with murder Sunday as the lone gunman in the deadly Poway Synagogue shooting, played piano for hours a day and earned a 4.31 grade point average. His father was a church elder whom neighbors called “the sweetest man.”But somewhere on his path, Earnest took a terrible turn, claiming Adolf Hitler as an idol and writing what appears to be his own rambling manifesto that Jews “deserved nothing but hell.” He wanted to be the one to, as he put it, “Send. Them. There.”Police say someone purporting to be him posted the anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, white supremacist “manifesto”—which eerily mirrored the Q&A; style that Christchurch terrorist Brenton Tarrant used in his own pre-massacre diatribe—about 20 minutes before he walked into the Poway synagogue with an AR-15 style assault rifle and started shooting—killing one woman and injuring three others—before the gun malfunctioned and he...
