JUPITER, Fla. — On March 26, Jupiter police found a man standing outside a car on Indiantown Road beneath the Interstate 95 overpass.
The booking photo Channel 5 used of Chapin Huffman is from a 2018 arrest in St. Petersburg, where police said he was headed, before his car apparently ran out of gas in Jupiter.
“You’re lucky in law enforcement when you get the opportunity to find these ahead of time,” retired FBI Agent John MacVeigh said. “And you’re not playing Monday Morning Quarterback by saying, ‘Oh my God, we should have known,' or somebody should have known this person was like that.”
MacVeigh looked at Huffman’s arrest report, where police claim they found almost 3,000 rounds of ammunition, five loaded semi-automatic handguns and three rifles in Huffman’s car.
“Who just goes and buys eight guns?” asked MacVeigh. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
The arrest report claims, police also found a notebook with writings labeled “…both suicidal and homicidal in nature.”
The arrest report also said “Huffman also wrote about conducting mass killings by running through a crowd and stabbing as many people as possible.”
“Somebody who writes about mass shootings, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to commit those type of crimes,” MacVeigh said. “And when you have somebody who has eight guns in their car, that’s all kinds of warning signs, they now have the means to do this.”
The arrest report also said Huffman targeted five people to kill, and compared himself to notorious killers, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and Richard Speck, writing, “My rampage would be unlike any other."
“Was he going to act on it? We don’t know,” MacVeigh said. “But on the surface, yes, it’s pretty bad.”
Contact 5 checked Huffman’s criminal history, which consists of arrests for marijuana possession and a DUI arrest after he T-boned a police squad car in St. Petersburg—offenses that do not prevent him from buying weapons legally.
Huffman is now in federal custody, charged with possessing firearms and ammunition, while being an unlawful user of, or addicted to, any controlled substance.
