Warlocks (Phoenix vs Harpies) Shooting: 3 Dead

The traditional Warlocks' logo is the Phoenix.

Recent activity regarding the City of Phoenix was detailed here on Friday.

Update/Clarification: All three men shot have died.

The Orlando Sentinel reports that the Warlocks were founded in Orange County in the late 1960s by Navy veteran Tom “Grub” Freeland. The club now has chapters throughout the U.S., England and Germany.
Members of the Pennsylvania Warlocks motorcycle club came to Florida to establish a chapter in Seminole County earlier this year but are not associated with the Florida Warlocks. According to records, the four men who were charged in the shooting are associated with the Pennsylvania club.

Earlier:

Law enforcement members talk to a man with a version of the motorcycle gang Warlocks logo on his jacket at the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) Post in Winter Springs, Florida on September 30, 2012. Photo: Jacob Langston.

On Sunday morning, September 30, 2012, at the VFW Post 5405, 420 North Edgemon Drive, Winter Springs, Florida, a shooting broke out. It has left two people dead and one critically injured. Authorities think all three victims were motorcycle-club members.

What was to be a charity run by a motorcycle club at the VFW Post turned ugly at 10:40 a.m. when riders were having breakfast and armed men came in and began shooting. A number of armed men started firing, according to witnesses at the scene who reported hearing up to 50 shots fired. The name of the other biker club was unknown, at press time.Witnesses claimed other Warlock affiliates came to the post during the incident.

Authorities have detained numerous individuals and gathered a number of weapons. Details are sketchy as to what exactly happened.

The Warlocks have made headlines around the central Florida region several times in recent years:

•In August 2012, the club's Melbourne headquarters was destroyed by a suspicious fire.

•In February 2012, a Windermere police officer was fired after authorities learned that he had been a member of the Warlocks and had a history of drug arrests.

•In 2011, three men thought to be Warlocks were removed from a Winter Park movie theater during a showing of Machine Gun Preacher after one of them was reported to be carrying a knife.

•In February 2011, a probationary member of the group was sentenced to life in prison for a 2009 shooting in Orange County.

•In 2003, an undercover operation by the ATF resulted in 34 arrests of Warlocks and Hell's Angels in six states, including Florida.

The Warlocks are #6 on the list of the "Top 10 Notorious American Biker Gangs."

The Warlocks Motorcycle Club was founded in 1967 in Florida, USA by ex-US naval servicemen serving on the USS Shangri-La aircraft carrier. It is a "one-percenter" motorcycle club with chapters in various parts of the United States, UK and Germany. Established by Tom "Grub" Freeland, an ex-US Navy sailor, on the outskirts of Orlando, Florida in 1967, its Mother Chapter is still based there. They have over nine chapters in Florida, five in South Carolina, four in Virginia, three in West Virginia, one in New York, two in Lincolnshire, England, two in Germany and one in Canada. There are also several Nomads who live and work in states that don't have Warlocks chapters. The club's insignia is a blazing Phoenix between a top and bottom rockers, and their colors are black, red and yellow and mottos include "Our Business is None of Your F**king Business" and "Warlocks forever, forever Warlocks" ("W.F.F.W."). ~ Source.

Although the Phoenix is the Warlocks logo, some in the media incorrectly identify the club's insignia as a Harpy, a legendary winged creature in Greek mythology.

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Updated insights from comments/private emails/past postings:

For a phoenix reference side by side with a false representation of a harpy, see:
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act III, Scene iii:
Sebastian: "...in Arabia there is one tree: the phoenix’ throne; one phoenix - at this hour reigning there." 
Later...
[Thunder and lightning]. Enter Ariel like a harpy claps his wings upon the table, and, with a quaint device, the banquet vanishes]
Prospero: "Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou performed, my Ariel; ...Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated... My high charms work, And these mine enemies are all knit up in their distractions. They now are in my power..." ~ Sent in by MB

The biker/phoenix link brings to mind the previously discussed Johnny Lewis tragedy. Lewis (a redhead who bore a slight resemblance to James Holmes) was well known for portraying a biker in the television program Sons of Anarchy. He was raised as a Scientologist, and acted in Scientology training films. The "Birthplace of Scientology" is Phoenix, Arizona. During Lewis' rampage, he performed the witchy (warlocky) act of dismembering a cat.
It gets syncier: The recently released film The Master, a thinly disguised critique of Scientology, stars Joaquin Phoenix, who portrays Freddie Quell, a character who rides a motorcycle. ~ Enki

One of the Columbine massacre survivors has recently created a support group for victims of mass violence. He is calling it "Phoenix999." ~ Starviego

On May 2, 2012, a neo-Nazi militia leader Jason "J.T." Ready killed four people and himself in Gilbert, Maricopa County, Arizona. Previously, he would gain publicity from bringing his Border Guard organization to an Occupy Phoenix rally.

Jared Lee Loughner was a military recruit at Military Entrance Processing Station in Phoenix, Arizona. His shooting at Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords' rally in Tucson on January 8, 2011, left 19 shoot, six dead, including a judge and the granddaughter of the former manager of the Chicago Cubs.

A mass shooting occurred at the Phoenix campus of the South Mountain Community College resulting in three people wounded on July 24, 2008.

Fire On Board Orioles Plane

Fire. Flight. Birds. Baltimore. Orioles. Rays.

The chartered flight carrying the Baltimore Orioles to their season-ending series with the Tampa Bay Rays had to make an emergency landing in Jacksonville, Florida on Sunday night, September 30, 2012, after a fire on board.

The fire was in the kitchen area.

The team is safe and sound at Jacksonville's airport while the situation is evaluated.

“They came on and told us we needed to make an emergency landing, and then we were nearly free falling for a few minutes as they raced to get us on the ground as fast as possible,” Ned Rice, who is with the baseball operations department of the Orioles, posted on his Facebook page.

Rice said the team is still in Jacksonville while fire crews inspect the plane.

No injuries have been reported.

Late Update: The airplane was diverted because of smoke in the forward galley. Michael Stewart, spokesman for the Jacksonville Aviation Authority, told The Associated Press that the plane was inspected and deemed OK to fly. The Orioles resumed their trip on the same aircraft, leaving Jacksonville International Airport at 10:15 p.m.
The Rays remain alive in the Wild Card chase, three games back of the Oakland Athletics for the league's second Wild Card spot. The Orioles are tied with the New York Yankees, leading the American League Eastern Division.

Everything Is Connected

Cloud Atlas will be released as a film, in the USA, on October 26, 2012. The motion picture is written and directed by Lana Wachowski, Tom Tykwer, and Andy Wachowski, based on the 2004 novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

"Everything is Connected" is the movie's tagline.

The Wachowski siblings are the directors, writers, and executive producers of The Matrix trilogy.

Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) from The Matrix.

"An epic story of humankind in which the actions and consequences of our lives impact one another throughout the past, present, and future as one soul is shaped from a murderer into a savior and a single act of kindness ripples out for centuries to inspire a revolution." ~ Cloud Atlas summary.

"If there is an underlying oneness of all things, it does not matter where we begin, whether with stars, or laws of supply and demand, or frogs, or Napoleon Bonaparte. One measures a circle, beginning anywhere." ~ Charles Fort, Lo! 1931.

Season of Suicides: Of Phoenix, Fox and Paradoxes

On September 27, 2001, the Zug massacre "happened." In Zug, Switzerland, Friedrich Leibacher shot 18 citizens, killing 14 and then took his own life. Eleven years later, during the same week, things didn't look much better on the evening news.

Phoenix. 

Fox. 

Suicides.

Signs. 

Balaclava.

Lewis.

Scientology.

Anarchy.

Aurora.

James Holmes.

James Holmes.

Phoenix.

The live Fox News broadcast of the suicidal end of a car chase on September 28, 2012, perhaps was to be expected. In an autumn of atrocities following a summer of the gun, should we have seen this coming?

TVNewser carried the beginning of this news at 3:48 PM, with these words:

A man committed suicide live on Fox News a few minutes ago. FNC had been carrying a car chase in the Phoenix area and when the suspect pulled over, he ran down a dirt road, then stopped, put a gun to his head, and fell to the ground. No other national networks were carrying the chase.

Wall-to-wall coverage of car chases in California, for years, with some mainstreaming of them nationally, has always toyed with the possible tragic end of the scenarios. Car chases are a result of the copycat effect, and the danger is that televised suicide copycats could follow too.

The last two days have been especially violent, bizarre, and suicidal/parasuicidal.

On September 27, 2012, at the Stillwater (Oklahoma) Junior High School, there was the suicide of Cade Poulos, who had dressed like Two Face/Harvey Dent from The Dark Knight and the Batman comics. 

Then in the afternoon, at 4:35 PM Thursday, at Accent Signage Systems in the Bryn Mawr neighborhood in Minneapolis, Minnesota, an employee who was fired a few hours earlier, killed 5 [revised] people and then took his own life.

July 2012 photo shows Andrew Engeldinger. Photo: Bill Klotz.

Andrew J. Engeldinger ( = Warrior Angel Striker), 36, killed the company’s owner Reuven Rahamim, Accent’s Director of Operations John Souter, production manager Eric Rivers, and two others whose identities have not been released. Three others were hospitalized, two critically. (Update on September 29th: Death toll has risen to six; one other individual was identified, Keith Basinski, a UPS driver.)

The company is revolutionary, and the founder Reuven Rahamim (above) actually was profiled as the "Mad Scientist of Signs."

Earlier on Thursday September 27, 2012, a tragedy visited New Fairfield, Connecticut: 

A small Connecticut town was sent reeling in grief and confusion Friday after a popular fifth-grade teacher shot and killed a knife-wielding prowler in a black ski mask, only to discover it was his 15-year-old son.
No immediate charges were brought against the father, Jeffrey Giuliano, in the slaying of his son, Tyler, who was gunned down in his aunt’s driveway next door to his own home around 1 a.m. Thursday.
“It’s something out of a Hollywood script,” said John Hodge, the first selectman, or top elected official, in the town of nearly 14,000 people about 50 miles from New York city. He said he couldn’t recall another killing in his eight years on the job. (See rest of article here.)

Thursday's and Friday's incidents followed the bizarre falling (suicidal) death of Sons of Anarchy star Johnny Lewis:

Johnny Lewis' gruesome demise left many questions unanswered when the Sons of Anarchy star plummeted to his death Wednesday after allegedly killing his 81-year-old landlady.
But as more information continues to surface about Lewis—his criminal past, his custody battle over his young daughter—one particular revelation sheds an intriguing light on the troubled star: his deep ties to Scientology.
A Church of Scientology source exclusively tells E! News that the actor's father, Michael Lewis, was a high-level Scientologist and that the star was "born into the church."

Johnny Lewis, July 2010. Photo: Jerry Avenaim.

Jonathan Kendrick "Johnny" Lewis (October 29, 1983 – September 26, 2012), also credited as Johnny K. Lewis, was an American actor, best known for playing Kip "Half-Sack" Epps in the first two seasons of the FX original series Sons of Anarchy. Lewis also appeared in supporting roles in the films Underclassman, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem and The Runaways. Lewis jumped from a roof into the driveway at a home in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, California.

We began in Phoenix (and are reminded of the "flashlight bombs" in May in Phoenix too); we shall end in Phoenix, with a developing news story:

Most of the people who saw a masked teenager wearing a sheet and armed with a grenade launcher told authorities they assumed the weapon was a fake as he pointed it at passing cars in northwest Phoenix, according to 911 calls released Thursday [September 27, 2012].
All of the callers calmly told 911 operators that a "small man" or a "kid" was pointing what looked like a bazooka, torpedo, rocket launcher, grenade launcher or a "long gun with a point at the end" at passing cars on July 28.
"I assume it's a fake. I hope so," one man told a 911 operator. "I think you guys should check it out."
"I don't know if it's real or not, but it's kind of bizarre," another male caller said. "He's wearing a dress with a torpedo on his shoulder and pointing it left and right."
"He had it pointed at me," another man said. "I got kind of freaked out."
A Phoenix man has been accused of filming his 16-year-old nephew to see how fast police would react to a mock terrorist act.
Michael D. Turley, 39, was arrested Monday [September 24, 2012], nearly two months after the bizarre film was posted to Google Inc.'s YouTube site.
In the film, the narrator whom police identified as Turley, said he wanted to see how long it took authorities to respond. The introduction to the video mentions the July 20 movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., that killed 12.
"Given this event, I wanted to run a little test here in Phoenix, Arizona," Turley said on the film in a disguised voice. "I want to find out how safe I really am, and I want to know the response time of the Phoenix police department."
The police response took just over three minutes from the first call, and a helicopter and SWAT team was dispatched as backup, according to Phoenix police spokesman James Holmes.
The YouTube clip showed the teen marching back and forth at an intersection with the camouflage-colored rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder. He was wearing a light-blue bedsheet and black head covering with black pants and black sneakers. The 911 callers' descriptions varied, with some saying it was a shawl, gown or dress.
"It looks like there's another kid with him videotaping him," one man told the operator. "They probably think it's funny. It's not really funny."
The first officer found Turley and the teen standing in Turley's driveway. The officer calmly told the boy to put down the weapon and Turley to put down the camera. Holmes said Turley told the officer they were just filming a movie, and the officer took down their names and left. (See rest of article, here).

Colorado = red. Aurora = dawn. Suspect shooter James Eagan (= fiery) Holmes.
Arizona = arid zone, small oak. Phoenix = fire bird. Police spokesman James Holmes.
Amazing.

The Phoenix has long been presented as a symbol of rebirth, immortality, and renewal. Is it also a symbol of the copycat effect, repeating patterns, and behavior contagion?

It has a 500 to 1000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young Phoenix or Phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again.... The Phoenix's ability to be reborn from its own ashes implies that it is immortal, though in some stories the new Phoenix is merely the offspring of the older one....In the course of the colonization of Northern America a number of cities have received the name of Phoenix or have been associated with its symbolism. Phoenix, the capital of Arizona, was so named as it was built on the ruins of the Hohokam civilization that had existed on the site centuries before. The Phoenix became the official symbol of Atlanta, Georgia in 1888 because it was "reborn" from the ashes after it was burned down in the American Civil War. ~ Wikipedia

Two other cities that use the Phoenix as their symbol: Detroit, Michigan and Portland, Maine (where I have lived since 1983).

Locations associated with the "Phoenix" symbolism are said to have had "new dawns" (auroras) occur after terrible fires destroyed large parts of their cities.

Thanks DJ, SM, MB, AWG, AM, CS, and others.

Oklahoma "Red" Suicide: Dressed As Batman's Two Face

Breaking News: Cade Poulos, September 26th's suicide, was dressed as the Batman supervillain Two-Face (Harvey Dent), for his school's "Super Hero Day." This appears to be in the realm of a copycat and continues the outcome we are seeing issuing from the "Bane/Joker" red dawn event in the wake of the Aurora shooting (July 20, 2012), allegedly carried out by James Eagan Holmes.

The comment from the Joker character that I quoted at the beginning of a recent posting, here, was delivered to Harvey Dent/Two Face in The Dark Knight (2008). There is a direct link from Bane/Joker to Harvey Dent/Two Face, Aurora to Stillwater, from Colorado to Oklahoma, from The Dark Knight Rises to The Dark Knight. The duality here is deadly obvious. We are sad to see that Cade Poulos' metaphoric flipping of the Harvey Dent/Two Face coin, to determine his own fate, landed on this tragic side.

The Daily Mail notes:

Several students told KOCO that Cade had gone to school dressed as the fictional character Two-Face, also known as Harvey Dent, for the day of costumes as part of Breast Cancer Awareness week.
***
Approximately 750 to 760 students attend the junior high school with students in grades eight and nine, according to Stillwater Superintendent Ann Caine.
The school sent a statement to parents saying there had been a 'single shooting incident' at the school and that staff and students – eighth and ninth graders – had been moved to a safe location. Parents were told to pick up their children at a nearby shopping center.
With Cade allegedly dressed as a popular Batman villain, the scene may have painted a grisly reminder of this summer's shootings at the Aurora, Colorado movie theatre where accused gunman James Holmes shot and killed 12 while dressed as the Joker.
'Everyone thought it was a joke at first,' ninth-grader Ashlyn Lundholm told the Stillwater NewsPress. 'Then I heard people screaming. Then we went to lockdown for 35 to 40 minutes.'

Cade Poulos

###

The Dark Knight character of Alfred Pennyworth (on right), Bruce Wayne's butler, was played by Michael Caine, in all three Christopher Nolan Batman films. 

Stillwater Superintendent Ann Caine is shown at the September 26th news conference, waiting to answer a question about the costumed Batman Harvey Dent/Two Face suicide event.

Earlier news:

Word has been received (early this a.m.) from the Red Dirt Report in Oklahoma that there's been a death in a school in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The victim of a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound at Stillwater Junior High School is a student and the shooting occurred at 7:50 a.m. on Wednesday, September 26, 2012. The suicide victim took his own life in a hallway as the school day was beginning.

The dead youth has been identified as Cade Poulos, 13, a natural redhead, who some have compared to the recent images of the "Joker."

According to one legend, Stillwater, Oklahoma got its name because local Native American tribes, the Ponca, Kiowa, Osage, and Pawnee, called the creek “Still Water” because the water was always still. "[H]e leadeth me beside the still waters" (Psalm 23:2b).

The name Oklahoma comes from the Choctaw phrase okla humma, literally meaning red people. Choctaw Chief Allen Wright suggested the name in 1866 during treaty negotiations with the federal government regarding the use of Indian Territory, in which he envisioned an all-Indian state controlled by the United States Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Equivalent to the English word Indian, okla humma was a phrase in the Choctaw language used to describe the Native American race as a whole. Oklahoma later became the de facto name for Oklahoma Territory, and it was officially approved in 1890, two years after the area was opened to white settlers. ~ Wikipedia

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Thanks AWG, AM, MB and CC.

Lone Ranger Death

Water. Bridger. Death.

Authorities say a crew member who died working on a set for the upcoming Johnny Depp film The Lone Ranger is a 48-year-old man from Redondo Beach, California.
The coroner's office announced on September 24, 2012, the man's name was Michael Andrew Bridger.

(This Michael Andrew Bridger is not be confused with Michael Andrew Bridger, who was born on October 5, 1943, with that name but today employs the name Michael Morpurgo, OBE, FKC, AKC, an English author, poet, playwright and librettist, best known for his work in children's literature about the coastline and the sea. Indeed, his contributions to Oxfam's Ox-Tales were in the "Water" selection.)

The Lone Ranger's Bridger was pronounced dead on September 21, 2012. The 48-year-old was in scuba gear cleaning a pool to be used on the film set in Acton, which is in northeast Los Angeles County, California. Early indication is that Bridger may have suffered a heart attack, but the final coroner's report is forthcoming.

A spokesman for producers Walt Disney said: “We regretfully confirm that a Lone Ranger crew member has passed away after being taken to a local hospital. Our full support is behind the investigation into the circumstances of this terrible event.”

Walt Disney Studios is producing the film The Lone Ranger as an upcoming action Western film directed by Gore Verbinski. The film stars Armie Hammer in the lead role and Johnny Depp as Tonto. It is due for release on July 3, 2013. Source.

Tonto

Tonto is going to be the major focus of the new Lone Ranger film because of the actor playing that role. Tonto is a fictional character, the American Indian companion of The Lone Ranger, another one of the popular American Western characters for the Lone Ranger series, created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker.

The character of Tonto was portrayed most famously on television by Jay Silverheels, a Canadian Mohawk First Nations actor. 

Johnny Depp, who plays Tonto in the new film, was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, and raised in Florida, as the youngest of four children of Betty Sue Palmer (née Wells), a waitress, and John Christopher Depp, a civil engineer. Nick Barratt, a researcher for the BBC genealogical TV program Who Do You Think You Are?, stated in 2011 he had traced Depp's family name, Deppes, to 14th-century French Huguenots living in England. Depp has surmised that he is part Native American, saying in 2011, "I guess I have some Native American [in me] somewhere down the line. My great-grandmother was quite a bit of Native American, she grew up Cherokee or maybe Creek Indian. Makes sense in terms of coming from Kentucky, which is rife with Cherokee and Creek." Source.

I’d actually seen a painting by an artist named Kirby Sattler, and looked at the face of this warrior and thought: ‘That’s it’. The stripes down the face and across the eyes… it seemed to me like you could almost see the separate sections of the individual, if you know what I mean. There’s this very wise quarter, a very tortured and hurt section, an angry and rageful section, and a very understanding and unique side. I saw these parts, almost like dissecting a brain, these silvers of the individual. That makeup inspired me. ~ Johnny Depp

(Depp's statements sound like the introspective transfiguration comments of Bob Dylan, detailed by Andrew Griffin and myself, recently.)

The Lone Ranger is The Green Hornet's Great-Uncle

The Lone Ranger is a fictional character, a masked ex-Texas Ranger who, with his Native American companion Tonto, fights injustice in the American Old West. The character has become an enduring icon of American culture. He first appeared in 1933 in a radio show conceived either by WXYZ radio station owner George W. Trendle and by Fran Striker, the show's writer. The radio series inspired a spin-off called The Green Hornet, which depicts the son of the Lone Ranger's nephew Dan, Britt Reid, originally played by Al Hodge, who in contemporary times fights crime with a similar secret identity and a sidekick, Kato. In the Green Hornet comic book series published by NOW Comics, the Lone Ranger makes a cameo through a portrait in the Reid home. Contrary to most visual media depictions, and acknowledged by developer/original scripter Ron Fortier to be the result of legal complications, his mask covers all of his face, as it did in the two serials from Republic Pictures. However, the properties have been acquired by separate owners and the familial link has been ignored in the Western character's various incarnations. The Lone Ranger-Green Hornet connection is part of Philip Jose Farmer's Wold Newton Universe, which connects disparate fictional characters. 

The Green Hornet is an American radio and television masked vigilante created by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker, with input from radio director James Jewell, in 1936. The name of Captain Reid's son, the Lone Ranger's nephew, a later character first introduced in the radio series, who became a sort of juvenile sidekick to the Masked Man, is also Dan Reid. When Trendle and Striker later created The Green Hornet, they made this Dan Reid the father of Britt Reid, alias the Green Hornet, thereby making the Lone Ranger the Green Hornet's great-uncle. 

The Green Hornet's Kato on television was played by Bruce Lee. 

Sources 1 & 2.

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NFL Should Worry About Suicides Again

Now that the replacement refs are a thing of the past, the NFL should worry about the suicide of its players again. Violence had returned to the NFL in a climate without rules. But what the recent events exposed were the raw violence just under the surface of the game.

Twitter, the sports media, and talk radio were abuzz with the outrageously terrible call giving a win to the Seattle Seahawks on Monday Night Football.

"The short version is that referees ruled that Seattle's Golden Tate caught a ball that, in fact, was clearly intercepted by the Green Bay Packers' M.D. Jennings. (The Atlantic Wire has the full story and the incredible video)," noted writer David Graham. "The officials and the National Football League ownership are at odds over retirement benefits and salary, as well as a couple more finer labor dispute points."

BTW, read "referees" as "replacement referees," that is "scabs," as in "strikebreakers."

What is incredible is that at a time when great attention was directed to how violent the sport of pro football had become due to the discovery of concussions, the NFL's ownership desire to not deal with the refs over 1/2250th of their total revenue had resulted in even more violent games.

Last weekend's games, including Monday night's battle, were showing direct evidence of the stripping bare of the basics of the game. The NFL contests were shown to be the graphically violent games that the sport had become, without proper guidance.

The most visual graphic of this was apparent during the Houston Texans' win over the Denver Broncos on Sunday, September 23rd, when Houston quarterback Matt Schaub took an illegal hit from Broncos defender Joe Mays. Schaub lost part of his earlobe on the play. (The image is at top.)

I seriously wondered if the NFL would allow what was happening proceed until someone was paralyzed on the field or killed in a tragedy on the 23rd yardline? Luckily, on September 27th, the NFL and regular officials settled.

But remaining in the background are suicides of NFL players that continue.

Unlike former star linebacker Junior Seau, who died by suicide with a gunshot to his chest in May 2012, and former star defensive back Dave Duerson, who took his life in similar fashion in February 2011, NFL player newest suicide victim, O.J. Murdock was not thinking about leaving his brain to science. He killed himself with a shoot to the head.

Murdock, 25, sent a text message to sports writer Bill Ward -- who covered his career at Tampa's Middleton High School -- just hours before he shot himself Monday, according to the Tampa Tribune. "Hey Mr Ward, it's OJ Murdock.... I just want to thank u for everything you've done for me and my family. Can't thank you enough," the text read.
Murdock, who signed with the NFL's Tennessee Titans last year, never responded to Ward's reply sent four hours later: "Hi O.J. Thanks for those kind words. Are you recovered from the Achilles and back in camp with the (Titans)?"

A Tampa police officer found Murdock "in his car in front of Middleton High School with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound" at 8:30 a.m. on July 30, 2012. Murdock died two hours later at Tampa General Hospital.

The conflict between the refs and the NFL, the loss of games, the increasing violence of the televised play were all unfortunate. But it all hid, temporarily, the unseen violence that continues in the bodies and minds of these men who are today's modern gladiators. Their pain and concussions may have taken a back seat to what was happening out there on the grass and screen right now, but the players' deaths continued, due to the simple fact they are combatants who are entertaining audiences with violence.

Will there be more darkness and blood before the dawn?

See also:

Seau's Suicide Euphoria, published May 8, 2012.

NFL Suicides: 12 in 25 Years, published May 2, 2012.

NFL Suicides: 1942 - 2010, published September 21, 2010.