Two days before Noah Harpham killed three people in a Colorado Springs shooting rampage, the 33-year-old wrote an incoherent Internet essay post and rambled in a video uploaded to YouTube.

“Hey, folks, this is Noah. Gettin’ my blog live,” Harpham says in the brief recording while walking around a room as techno music blares in the background.

Harpham goes on to talk nonsensically about a pastor’s sermon. In the essay, he writes of “mind-control technique” and God.

The El Paso County Sheriff’s Office on Monday afternoon formally identified Harpham as the gunman in the vicious Saturday slayings that spanned several city blocks. He died in a shootout with police.

AUDIO: Hear raw audio from Colorado Springs police as they responded to the shooting

“Words cannot express our heartfelt sympathies that go out to the families and friends of the victims,” Harpham’s father and brother wrote in a statement first reported by The Gazette. “We ask for privacy as our family tries to deal with this tragedy.”

The Denver Post could not find a criminal record for Harpham in Colorado. Efforts to reach his family on Monday were unsuccessful.

Harpham’s mother, Heather Kopp, wrote about her son’s struggles with alcohol and drug addiction in a 2013 book titled “Sober Mercies: How Love Caught Up with a Christian Drunk.” In an eHarmony account, Harpham wrote of being in Alcoholics Anonymous and being sober since December 2013.

“(I’m) just a big friendly giant,” he said on the dating website.

Minutes after the shooting began Saturday, police rushed to confront Harpham in the middle of a busy intersection just east of downtown, dispatch archives show.

Near East Platte and Wahsatch avenues, officers found the armed killer — a tall, curly-haired man clad in a black hat and green jacket — and a battle ensued.

“Shots fired! My cruiser is shot at!” an officer hollered over his radio, according to archives captures on Broadcastify.com.

At 9:01 a.m., about seven minutes after police were first dispatched to the area, Harpham was under police control.

“We do have the suspect shot,” the same officer said.

As emergency responders tended to Harpham, investigators began finding the carnage the killer had left in his path over several blocks — a bicyclist slain in broad daylight and two women found gunned down together.

“This is a headshot,” an officer told dispatch of what he found at one of the scenes.

“This whole area is a crime scene,” another said over his radio.

Authorities have been slow to release details in the rampage, waiting until Monday evening to identify the slain bicyclist as 35-year-old Andrew Alan Myers and the two women as Jennifer Michelle Vasquez, 42, and Christina Rose Baccus-Gallela, 34.

Investigators have not said what motivated Harpham’s apparently random attacks.

“It would be way too early to speak to that,” Lt. Catherine Buckley, a police spokeswoman, said Monday.

Officers were first called on reports of a “possible shooting” at 230 North Prospect Street — a townhouse-like building — where they found the bicyclist dead and a fire burning, the dispatch archives show.

The county sheriff’s office will investigate the officer-involved shooting and once completed, that investigation will be turned over to prosecutors for review. The four officers involved have been placed on administrative leave per police department policy.

The officers were not wearing body cameras and their patrol cars did not have dashboard cameras, the sheriff’s office says.

Witnesses watched in horror as Harpham picked his victims off. One of them, the bicyclist, pleaded for his life before being killed.

“I heard the (young man) say, ‘Don’t shoot me! Don’t shoot me!’ ” Naomi Bettis, a neighbor who witnessed the killing, said Monday.

Bettis said she recognized the gunman as her neighbor — whom she didn’t know by name — and that before the initial slaying she saw him roaming outside with a rifle. She called 911 to report the man, but a dispatcher explained that Colorado has an open carry law that allows public handling of firearms.

“He did have a distraught look on his face,” Bettis said. “It looked like he had a rough couple days or so.”

After Harpham shot the bicyclist, Bettis said she watched him walk toward Platte Avenue. She then heard more gunfire.

Matt Abshire, who lives in the area, told The Gazette he followed the killer westbound on East Platte Avenue.

While on the phone with police, Abshire said he saw Harpham turn and shoot at two women. By the time Abshire reached the pair, one of them had stopped breathing, he told newspaper.

“She was dead,” Abshire said.

It appeared one of the women had been shot in the face, he said.

Vasquez and Baccus-Galella were living in a sober living home as part of a substance recovery program in Colorado Springs called the Alano House, the organization says. The women were both mothers.

“She was a mom, daughter, sister, cousin and niece,” Baccus-Galella’s aunt Rita Nicholas posted on one of the sites. “Her children are young and don’t understand why their mom was taken.”

Other residents who lived in the home, some of whom witnessed the shootings, were displaced in the killings’ wake.

Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers, in a statement released Monday, called the shootings a tragedy, calling those slain “three innocent victims.”

“On behalf of all the citizens of Colorado Springs, I want to convey our heartfelt sympathies to the families and friends of the victims of this crime,” he said.

Jesse Paul: 303-954-1733, jpaul@denverpost.com or @JesseAPaul