April 19th Again: Nova Scotia's Mass Shooting

The high school photograph of Nova Scotia's mass shooter.

Is this another "incel" incident?

For several years I have written of this time of year as a "red zone of danger." I even mentioned the temporal syndrome associated with late April's infamous events in The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines.

During the morning of April 19, 2020, I tweeted a message about recalling today as a date with multiple anniversaries of note: the original Patriots Day of the Revolutionary War due to the battles at Concord and Lexington. The events of Waco and the Oklahoma City Bombing on this date.

I posted images of the Boym Design's two "Buildings of Disaster" for Waco and OKC's Murrah Building.

I have pointed to my extensive listing of violence and deaths tied to this last half of several Aprils in past blog postings, including "The Most Dangerous Time of Year," from 2018, and "The Red Zone of April: A Dangerous Time."

In that piece, I review these events for

April 19:

1775 – Battles of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. This is the actual anniversary of the battles, even though the observance has become a date tied to the third Monday in April.
1897 – First running of the Boston Marathon, with marathons named after the Greek Battle of Marathon.
1993 – The 51-day FBI siege of the Branch Davidian building outside Waco, Texas, USA, ends when a fire breaks out. Eighty-one people die.
1993 – South Dakota governor George Mickelson and seven others are killed when a state-owned aircraft crashes in Iowa.
1995 – Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, USA, is bombed, killing 168.
1995 – Richard Wayne Snell, a convicted murderer, member of the white supremacist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), is executed in Arkansas. Snell was involved in filming the planes that landed at the restricted airport in Mena, Arkansas, believed by many conspiracy theorists to be used in a CIA-sanctioned cover-up to smuggle drugs into America. Snell had been accused of plotting to bomb the Murrah Building in the 1980s. Snell reportedly watched televised reports of the Oklahoma City bombing on the day of his execution and nodded in approval.
2013 – Boston Marathon bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev is killed in a shootout with police. His brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is captured while hiding in a boat inside a backyard in Watertown, Massachusetts.


April 20:

1889 – Adolf Hitler, Austrian-German soldier and politician, Chancellor of Germany (d. 1945) is born
1939 – Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday is celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany.
1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
1961 – Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.
1971 – According to Steven Hager, editor of High Times, he found the term 420 originated at San Rafael High School in 1971, among the Waldos. They would meet every day after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke marijuana at the Louis Pasteur statue. One of the Waldos notes, "We did discover we could talk about getting high in front of our parents without them knowing by using the phrase 420." By extension now, April 20 ("4/20" in U.S. dating shorthand) has evolved into a counterculture holiday, where people gather to celebrate and consume cannabis.
1978 – Korean Air Lines Flight 902 is shot down by the Soviet Union.
1999 – Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed 13 people and injured 21 others before dying by suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.
2007 – Johnson Space Center shooting: William Phillips with a handgun barricades himself in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas before killing a male hostage and himself.
2015 – A substitute teacher was killed at the Joan Fuster School in the La Sager neighborhood of Barcelona, Spain, by a 13-year-old student with a crossbow and machete. Four other people were injured.


Now on April 19, 2020

Therefore, today, Sunday, April 19, 2020, we should not be surprised to learn that a mass shooting has occurred.

From Saturday through Sunday, for 12 hours, a gunman drove across the northern part of the province of Nova Scotia shooting people dead. Canadian police, as of Sunday night, said at least 16 people were dead, plus the gunman too. On Monday morning, during the COVID19 government news conference, the prime minister said a total of 19 people had died.

One of the dead was a police officer and another was injured. The dead officer has been identified as Heidi Stevenson, a mother of two and a 23-year-old veteran of the force.

The victims identified so far, besides RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson, a 23-year member of the national police force, and a mother of two, are Debert Elementary school teacher Lisa McCully; care assistant Kristen Beaton; and Heather O’Brien, a nurse from Truro. Additionally, two correctional officers and two neighbors of the gunman, were all killed in their homes.

Altogether, including the shooter, twenty-three (23) people died in the shooting.

The gunman was named as 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman, who died after shooting people in several locations across the province. He was described as white male, bald, 6'2" - 6'3" with green eyes.

The shooting reportedly began in the small Atlantic coastal town of Portapique, about 130km north (80 miles) of Halifax, the provincial capital. It ended Sunday, April 19, at a gas station in Enfield. Online records show Wortman ran a denture clinic in the city of Dartmouth, across the water from Halifax.

One local resident said she had come across two burning police vehicles while out driving on Sunday morning. One man said he saw at least three separate fires.

“There was one officer we could see on scene and then all of a sudden, he went running toward one of the burning vehicles,” Darcy Sack told the CBC.

“We heard gunshots,” she said, adding that one police officer looked to have been injured.Authorities said Wortman was driving what appeared to be a police car and was wearing a uniform but later reported he was at the wheel of a Chevrolet sports utility vehicle that had been modified to resemble a white RCMP vehicle – “one that he has basically made himself,” said Brian Sauvé, president of the National Police Federation. Police have said the suspect was not an employee or officer with the RCMP.

There was on difference between Wortman's car and the official RCMP vehicles: the car #. The suspect's car is 28B11, behind rear passenger window.

“In excess of 10 people have been killed,” RCMP Chief Superintendent Chris Leather said, before later revising the total to “at least 13.” “We believe it to be one person who is responsible for all the killings and that he alone moved across the northern part of the province and committed what appears to be several homicides.”

Please note, in high school, Wortman said his "future may include being an RCMP officer."

Name game: "Wortman" = a grower or seller of vegetables or of medicinal herbs and spices.

+++

RCMP's fallen Heidi Stevenson is to be remembered on Friday, April 24, 2020.

April 20, 2020

What will Monday, April 20th begat?

In 2015, Mother Jones mentioned the high number of "copycats" associated with Columbine. In The Copycat Effect, I tracked over 400 in the month after the April 20, 1999 Columbine shooting.

The cult of Hitler's birthday and Columbine travel forth into the future.

Columbine Copycats Continue: Teacher's Crossbow Death in Barcelona

There has been a fatal death in a school in Spain. We should not be surprised it happened today, April 20, 2015.

Someone has posted the top photo at the Joan Fuster School website. It is a screen capture from a past season of Game of Thrones, in which crossbows become important story elements, involved in various significant deaths.

A 13-year-old Spanish boy armed with a crossbow and a machete killed a substitute teacher and injured four people at his school, the Joan Fuster School in the La Sagrera neighborhood of Barcelona, Spain.

La Sagrera, according to my research associate Red Pill Junkie, is from the word sagrera, which translates as the hallowed space around consecrated chapels, inside which cellars and store rooms were built to keep wine and cereals.

Therefore, I must observe, in terms of the name game, this is a "cereal"/"serial" killing, of sorts.

There is an occult nose-thumbing at the bottom of many of these twilight language cereal murders, such as Jack the Ripper - poking fun at the investigators and the public because so many don't get the black comedy at the heart of it. It's a feeling of superiority magnified exponentially. ~ Michael Hoffman III, Cereal Murder and the Group Mind, 2000.

The Joan Fuster School is named after Joan Fuster i Ortells (November 23, 1922 – June 21, 1992), who was a Spanish writer. He is considered a major writer in Catalan language, and his work contributed to reinvigorate left-wing, pro-Catalan nationalism in Valencia during the Spanish transition to democracy. In his influential political essay Nosaltres, els valencians (1962) he coined the term Països Catalans (Catalan Countries) to refer to the Catalan-speaking territories, for which he claimed independent statehood from Spain. Intriguingly, datewise, on September 11, 1981, two bombs exploded in his house, damaging heavily his library and archive. Nobody was prosecuted, but it is widely believed that it was the anti-Catalan far right's response to Fuster's political and cultural position.

In the school attack today, a substitute teacher shot was dead from the use of a crossbow. Four others were injured, including two female teachers.

The Spanish Teachers' Union says this is the first ever case of a pupil carrying out fatal attack on teacher in Spain.

Due to the legal system in Spain, the student cannot be charged for attack as he is under the criminal age of responsibility in Spain. Police have detained a 13-year-old after a teacher was shot dead with a crossbow and several others injured in a Barcelona secondary school.

"A male teacher was killed shortly after 9am this morning at the Joan Fuster secondary school in Barcelona," a police spokesman told The Local.

The weapon used in the attack was widely reported to be a crossbow, but there was no official confirmation from police.

The male teacher, thought to have been working as a social sciences substitute, was killed after being shot with a crossbow by a 13-year-old pupil, who was also armed with a dagger (or a machete, in some reports).

She confirmed that four others had been injured. "Two female teachers and two pupils suffered injuries and three of them are recovering well in hospital," the spokesman for the Catalan police force told The Local.

A report in the Vanguardia said he was obsessed with the military and had a collection of weapons at home. A fellow pupil told the Catalan newspaper that his classmate had said he wanted to kill all the teachers at the school and was known to draw up blacklists.

According to reports in Spanish media, the male pupil arrived late at school, at around 9:15 a.m.

The teacher who was killed reportedly came running from the next door class room when he heard screams.

Spanish media are reporting that the pupil fired at a female teacher who opened the door to him, as well as her daughter, who was one of his fellow pupils.

Hearing screams, a teacher from a neighboring classroom came running to help and was fatally shot in the chest.

The teacher "left to see what was happening and that was when the young man attacked him," one student, who requested anonymity, told AFP.

Moments later the suspect went into the teacher's own classroom, attacked a girl and went back into the hallway with a knife in his hand.

Terrified students closed the classroom door and barricaded it with furniture.

Apparently, the Spanish media are publishing graphic imagery, such as above.

In 2012, a man was arrested for reportedly planning to plant bombs around a university in Palma de Mallorca. The man had written in an online blog and personal diary of his admiration for the 1999 Columbine killers in Colorado.

The Joan Fuster attack was carried out on the 16th anniversary of the massacre at Columbine High School in the US, when two students murdered 12 students and one teacher.

The attack on Monday morning also immediately sparked comparisons to the fictional story, We Need to Talk about Kevin, in which dysfunctional teenager Kevin carried out a crossbow massacre at his high school gym.

The 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver was turned into a movie in 2011 starring Tilda Swinton.

Spain has had three previous well-known cases of crossbow attacks, according to El Pais.

In 2009, a German man who was reportedly mentally ill became obsessed with Spanish actress Sara Casanovas. The man found Casanovas at a Madrid theatre, fired the crossbow aimed at her, but she was able to dodge the shot and stage technicians restrained him until police arrived.

The Barcelona area was the site of a similar crossbow crime in 1994 when 20-year-old Andrés Rabadán, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, killed his own father before turning himself in.

In 1986, a man and his brother-in-law were charged for killing a man, who was allegedly extorting one of the perpetrators, by beating him with a baseball bat, stabbing him in the arm with a crossbow arrow and shooting him with a shotgun.

This may be one of the most dangerous copycat times of the year.

April 19th is the anniversary of the deaths occurring at the end of the Waco events and the Oklahoma City bombing. It is an older anniversary of the Revolutionary War, of militia deaths, and other violent incidents - Patriots' Day, celebrated in Massachusetts and Maine. 

The Boston Marathon Bombing took place two years ago - in 2013. This race happens on Patriots' Day.

Patriots' Day (sometimes incorrectly punctuated Patriot's Day or Patriots Day) is a civic holiday commemorating the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. It is observed in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and State of Maine (once part of Massachusetts), and is a public school observance day in Wisconsin. Observances and re-enactments of these first battles of the American Revolution occur annually at Lexington Green in Lexington, Massachusetts, (around 6 am) and The Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts (around 9 am). In the morning, a mounted re-enactor with State Police escort retraces Paul Revere's ride, calling out warnings the whole way.

In 2013, the race ended very badly, with the bombing.

Let's also revisit April 19th for 1993 and 1995, for a moment.

The Waco siege began on February 28, 1993, when the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) attempted to execute a search warrant at the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel, a property located nine miles east-northeast of Waco, Texas. An exchange of gunfire resulted in the deaths of four agents and six followers of David Koresh. A subsequent 51-day siege by the Federal Bureau of Investigation ended on April 19th when fire destroyed the compound. Seventy-six people (24 of them British nationals) died in the fire, including more than 20 children, two pregnant women, and Koresh himself.

The Oklahoma City bombing was the bomb attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, when American militia movement sympathizer Timothy McVeigh allegedly detonated a truck filled with explosives parked in front of the building. McVeigh's co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, had assisted in the bomb preparation. Their motive allegedly was to avenge the government's handling of the Waco siege and Ruby Ridge incidents. (Intriguingly, Rebirth of Pan author Jim Brandon has pointed out to me that "Nichols" and its variations are on his "names of power" list to watch.)

Then Columbine happened on April 20, 1999.

On April 20, 1999, two teenage students, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, carried out a deadly shooting rampage at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado killing 12 students and a teacher, and wounding 24 others before dying by suicide.

This is a danger zone time of year for school violence. Columbine haunts the world of school violence. Just in 1999, over 500 copycat threats and incidents occurred in North America.

Let's not forget that Columbine happened on Hitler's birthday too.

Then on April 26, 2002, on Rudolf Hess's birthday, Robert Steinhäuser, killed 16 people plus himself at his Erfurt, Germany high school. He had files on his computer, which contained information about the Columbine Massacre. Steinhäuser had outdone the Columbine total (which may have been one of his goals).

Adolf Hitler, it will be recalled, died by his own hand, ten days after his birthday, on April 30, 1945, exactly 70 years ago, in 2015.

The Virginia Tech shooting (also known as the Virginia Tech massacre) was a school shooting that took place on April 16, 2007, on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech, shot and killed 32 people and wounded 17 others in two separate attacks (another six people were injured escaping from classroom windows), approximately two hours apart, before dying by suicide. Cho noted the Columbine killers in his writings. There is no doubt it was a copycat.

In Cho Seung-Hui's twisted and tortured mind, the Columbine killers were martyrs on a par with Jesus Christ. And the world had forced him to join their ranks. Friendless by choice, he accepted Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold as his brothers, and dreamed that his violent acts would bear "children." ~ "Cho idolized Columbine killers," Denver Post, April 18, 2007.

Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui plagiarized other school shooting psychos in a twisted show of one-upmanship. He used the Internet to research and learn from infamous school killers, including Columbine's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold..."Cho was an empty vessel and he poured himself full from images off the Internet...," said Loren Coleman, an expert on school shootings and the author of The Copycat Effect. "There's a psychological process that these shooters appear to be competing for - the high body count." ~ "Sick homages from a student of psychos," N.Y. Post, April 22, 2007.

I have been warning about this "Red Danger Zone" time for years. Now the Grim Reaper has struck in Spain.

Murder and suicide are two sides of the same coin played out in going postal, workplace violence, shooting spree, and school shooting incidents, which are impacted by the copycat effect. Watch for any of those this week too.

Being forewarned and aware is half the battle. Vulnerable, suicidal, homicidal youth need help and attention, long before it gets to the stage where they feel there's no turning back. Keep talking, take care, get people help, and remain alert, with your guard up.

A few bloggers may wish to demean the predictive insights of known patterns, but ridicule does not overwhelm the reality of history. Killers do pick special dates.

And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time. And so it goes, and so it goes. And the book says, "We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us." ~ Magnolia, 1999.

Bundy Ranch

In 2014, the moniker "Bundy" is linked to events reminding many of Ruby Ridge, Waco, and other similar situations. The Bundy Standoff (also known as the Bundy Ranch Standoff and the Siege of Bundy Ranch) is an ongoing standoff between the United States Bureau of Land Management and cattle farmer Cliven Bundy. The standoff originated when the BLM accused Bundy of herding cattle which threatened the desert tortoise.

Reports of black helicopters being used to herd Bundy cattle to be caught and killed by the BLM has further incited anger in the Old West, and raised fears of government conspiracy and mistreatment. The BLM has designated "First Amendment areas," deemed as the only place where protesters (in support of Bundy) are allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights.

April Flashbacks: Waco, OKBomb, Columbine, Hitler, Patriots Day, VA Tech...

It will be recalled that the Waco Siege (also known as the Waco Massacre) was a standoff and assault of a compound belonging to the religious group Branch Davidians by American federal and Texas state law enforcement and military between February 28 and April 19, 1993.

Four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians killed in initial raid. A 51-day siege ensued, ending with an FBI assault during which the compound burned down, killing 76 people, including many children, inside, including David Koresh. Eleven people who left the compound were arrested.

As a direct result of the events at Waco were cited as the primary motivation for the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing that took place exactly two years later in 1995.

Timothy McVeigh cited the Waco incident as a primary motivation for the Oklahoma City bombing, his April 19, 1995 truck bomb attack that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, a U.S. government office complex in downtown Oklahoma City, and destroyed or damaged numerous other buildings in the vicinity. The attack claimed 168 lives (including 19 children under the age of 6) and left over 600 injured in the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil prior to the September 11 attacks, and as of 2014 it remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.

The Murrah building had been previously targeted in October 1983 by white supremacist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, including founder James Ellison and Richard Snell. The group had plotted to park "a van or trailer in front of the Federal Building and blow it up with rockets detonated by a timer." After Snell's appeal for murdering two people in unrelated cases was denied, he was executed the same day as the Murrah bombing. Richard Wayne Snell (May 21, 1930 – April 19, 1995) watched the television reports of the Murrah Building bombing before he was put to death in Arkansas.

In his last words before being executed, Snell addressed then-Governor Jim Guy Tucker:

Governor Tucker, look over your shoulder; justice is coming. I wouldn't trade places with you or any of your cronies. Hell has victories. I am at peace.

Other events sharing the date of fire at Mt. Carmel have been mentioned in discussions of the Waco siege. The April 20, 1999, Columbine High School massacre might have been timed to mark either an anniversary of the FBI's assault at Waco or Adolf Hitler's birthday. Some of the connections appear coincidental. April 19 was the date from the American Revolution's opening battles ("the shot heard round the world") and was also the date of the opening of the siege on the CSAL group in Arkansas in 1985. On April 17, 2013, a fertilizer plant exploded at West near Waco, two days after the Boston Marathon bombings that some speculatively connected to an upcoming 20th anniversary of the Waco incident of 1993, as well as to an anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre of April 16, 2007.

Another Link: Ruby Ridge

The Siege of Ruby Ridge has been cited as a precursor to what may be unfolding at the Bundy Ranch standoff. Ruby Ridge was the site of a deadly confrontation and siege in northern Idaho between August 21 – August 31, 1992 against Randy Weaver, his family and his friend Kevin Harris by agents of the United States Marshals Service (USMS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It resulted in the death of Weaver's son Sammy, his wife Vicki, and Deputy U.S. Marshal William Francis Degan.

It appears an April encounter with a helicopter was behind why people were killed at Ruby Ridge. Following an April 18, 1992 fly-over by a helicopter for the Geraldo Rivera "Now It Can Be Told" TV show, US Marshal Service HQ received media reports that Weaver had fired on the helicopter. That day in Idaho, a US Marshals team was installing surveillance cameras overlooking the Weaver property at the time of the fly-over. The field report for April 18, 1992 filed by Marshal W. Warren Mays reported seeing a helicopter near the Weaver property, but not hearing any shots fired.

Weaver then granted an interview with a newspaper reporter in which he, family and friends present that day denied firing on the helicopter. The helicopter pilot Richard Weiss eventually gave FBI FD-302 interviews denying that Weaver fired on his helicopter.

The media reports that Weaver had fired on the Rivera helicopter became part of the justification later cited by USMS Wayne "Duke" Smith and FBI HRT Commander Richard Rogers in drawing up the Ruby Ridge Rules of Engagement on August 21–22, 1992. Also, in spite of Richard Weiss' repeated denials that shots had been fired at his helicopter, US Attorney Ron Howen would charge that, as Overt Act 32 of the Weaver's Conspiracy Against the Federal Government, Randy, Vicki and Harris fired two shots at the Rivera helicopter.

Bundy

Formerly, the name "Bundy" was associated with an infamous serial killer of the 1970s. The adopted son of Johnny Culpepper Bundy, Ted Bundy (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) would go on to kill perhaps 30 young women in seven states between 1974 and 1978.

The quick meaning of the name Bundy is "free."

A little more digging shows links to the fate of Cliven Bundy:

Bundy: This interesting surname, of Anglo-Saxon origin, with variant spellings Bownd, Bownde, Bounde, was at first a status surname for a peasant farmer or husbandman. The derivation is from the Olde English pre 7th Century "bonda, bunda", reinforced by the Old Norse "bonde, bondi", in Middle English, "bonde". The ultimate derivation is disputed; it may be connected with the Olde English "buan", to dwell, hence "buende", a dweller, but is thought more likely to be from "bindan", to bind. It was originally used to signify a farmer holding lands from and bound by loyalty to a lord, and hence a free landowner. After the Norman Conquest the name became associated with the idea of bound servitude. Source.

+++++UPDATE APRIL 12, 2014+++++

TL Reader Discovers: "You Accurately Predicted This In 2005"

Patriots' Day. The Boston Marathon. I foresaw this, it appears.

As many of you recall, on September 17, 2012, Dangerous Minds published "Copycat Effect: Meet The Man Who Predicted The Aurora Shooting" by British writer Thomas McGrath. You may wish to read it, if you haven't yet. I detailed a bit of the background to McGrath's article in my piece, "The Man Who Predicted The Aurora Shooting."

Because one of the final questions McGrath asked was about other predictions, I addressed his inquiry by posting "Ten Predictions: Ten Hits."

Now, as it turns out, thanks to an alert reader of this blog, I've been reminded that, indeed, I, Loren Coleman, did foretell the Patriots' Day Boston Marathon terrorist bombing - eight years ago.

I didn't go looking for this, so you can imagine my surprise when I found someone had "discovered" in my past writings that I had "predicted" the Marathon bombings. I had literally forgotten that I had written what was pointed out to me.

On April 25th, I began receiving messages from a reader, Carol J., saying "I decided to randomly browse posts from past years and see that you accurately 'predicted' this [Boston Marathon event] in 2005."

I asked her a little more about how this happened and Carol J. shared, "It was very eerie when I came across it. I felt like I wanted to read something from the past to get my mind off the present and my finger was hovering over 2006 and then it was almost like my finger felt kind of 'pulled' to 2005....For real! Synchromysticism and following intuition at its best."

What Carol J. had found was a long posting I had written on September 10, 2005. In that blog entry, I wrote of the importance of being aware of the special significance of numbers, dates, and special days, in relationship to future acts of terrorism. I penned these words:

...what about the dates? This Bush administration's little known badly named Patriot Day (9/11) may or may not be that important to al Qaeda, as I think they have their own number, date, and name game agenda. They might wish to go for the real Patriots Day, in April, in Maine, or the Patriots Day in Massachusetts, at the Boston Marathon, for example. Thousands of people there. Of course, this is not an invitation, but we have to see that we might not see what they see....

And...

Well, then, truth be told, I live in Portland, Maine, where 9/11 all began for Mohammed Atta, who picked Flight 11, so needless to say, I'm not letting my guard down on 9/11/05. Or 11/9/05. Or 11/11 (Veteran's Day). Or on next April's Patriots Day 2006, 2007, 2008, and so forth. Atta, the leader of the operations wing of 9/11, historically, was tied into those elevens. Afterall, the first mastermind of the 1993 Twin Towers attack was Ramzi Yousef, and he used parts of Bonjinka, a plan to place bombs on 11 planes in the Phillippines, for the eventual 9/11 attacks. Yousef's test run for Bonjinka occurred on, you guessed it, another eleven, December 11, 1994. Sometime, look up the 1970 origins of the naming of the group 'Black September,' whose kidnapping of Israeli athletes attending the Munich Olympics (which was scheduled to end on September 11, 1972), ended in the death of 11 of those athletes. Certainly, 9/11 hits very close to home. And lives on. Mysteries remain that may be hidden in numbers and places.

Clearly, the combination of Patriots Day and the Boston Marathon was too tempting for the terrorists who would conduct the first major attack at a public event, post-9/11.

The scope of the Boston Marathon bombing is enormous. Five deaths resulted: three people from the April 15th bombing, one police officer from the firefight on April 18th, and one suspect from shooting on April 19th. A total of 299 people were injured, with 282 of them from the initial bombs on April 15th, 16 police officers from the firefight on April 19th, and one suspect from shooting on April 19th. The injuries to the victims of the bombings were severe, involving limbs lost at the bomb sites or due to amputations to save their lives.

It was a terrible and horrible series of events in Boston on Patriots' Day. Let us wish and pray that other terrorists will not see what occurred in Boston as a roadmap for future copycat incidents. That is certainly my fear, based on what I know of behavior contagion. It does make me sad to be able to "see" this coming. I take no delight in being close in my predictions.

My hope is that someday, somewhen, predicting behavior patterning is developed to such a level that violent and fatal events can be prevented.

My ideas and insights about "predicting" such events are in my 2004 book, 

a work that the media never wants you to read.

 

The Copycat Effect

(NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004)

Never forget, remember...