GAY BAR HORROR: Pro-Palestine photographer and pal gunned down outside Tucson club - shooter from Gambia then kills himself

A gay photographer known for covering pro-Palestinian street protests and a friend were shot dead in a Tucson parking lot this week — then the gunman turned the weapon on himself.

Police say the massacre outside Venture-N, a longtime midtown gay bar, was a targeted hate crime against the LGBTQ community. The killer, they say, had a list of other gay-friendly businesses on him and left more writings at home spelling out why he did it.

Cameron Davis Capara, 33, and Vincent Anthony Siqueiros, 42, were confronted just after 12:30 a.m. Monday, Aug. 31, as they left the bar. Both were pronounced dead at the scene. Ousman Ceesay, 44, was found with a gunshot wound and died at a hospital of a self-inflicted shot, police said. Investigators recovered a 9mm handgun and said all the casings came from the same gun.

Ceesay did not know the two men, police said. He had only recently arrived in Tucson after years in Oklahoma. A search of his home turned up a note indicating he acted alone and that the attack was “motivated by hate toward the LGBTQIA+ community,” Tucson police said. He was also carrying a list of other LGBTQ-associated spots.

“Bias-based crimes are especially heinous and have no place in our community,” Police Chief Monica Prieto said. Officers boosted patrols around other gay-friendly businesses after the shooting. There was no indication of a wider threat, police said.

Capara was a familiar face at Tucson protests. Friends described him as a social-justice photographer who spent years documenting LGBTQ nightlife, campus “encampment” demonstrations, rallies over Gaza and protests against ICE. His mother, Berni Capara, called him a “wonderful and caring person” whose passion was photography — and said the idea that someone would kill him for being gay was “outrageous.”

Siqueiros was remembered by his sister as joyful and fearless. Hundreds later packed Catalina Park for a candlelight vigil organized by local LGBTQ groups. Capara’s father, Jeff, told the crowd he was “shocked and overjoyed” by the turnout.

Ceesay was born in The Gambia, a small West African nation. A cousin, Muhammad Sylva, told the Arizona Daily Star the two grew up in the same household. Ceesay came to the United States around 2010 on a student visa to attend college in Oklahoma, later married an Oklahoma woman in 2012 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen, Sylva said. He remembered Ceesay sending a video of his naturalization ceremony. Public records listed Ceesay as an Uber driver with little U.S. criminal history beyond a 2012 speeding ticket. He had lived in Oklahoma City as recently as last December.

Sylva said Ceesay was a practicing Muslim who prayed five times a day — and insisted he had never heard his cousin talk about hating gay people. Police have not publicly described any other ideology beyond the anti-LGBTQ writings they recovered. Gambia remains a conservative, overwhelmingly Muslim country where same-sex relations are illegal.

The grim details have already set off a familiar fight online: one side treating the case as proof that anti-gay hatred still kills, the other pointing to the killer’s birthplace and the victim’s protest photography as a brutal collision of causes. Police, for now, are sticking to what they found on paper — a targeted attack on two men leaving a gay bar, and a shooter who did not walk away.