The Red Zone of April: A Dangerous Time

The Red Zone of April: A Dangerous Time

by Loren Coleman, author of The Copycat Effect (Simon and Schuster, 2004), Suicide Clusters (Faber & Faber, 1987), and other books.

"April is the cruellest month... " 

by T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). 

From The Waste Land, 1922.

April 14-5

1865 – On the eve of the fifth day of Passover, April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot and died of his wounds in the early morning of April 15th, which had already been scheduled as a national day of prayer to mark the end of the Civil War. Jews across the land were gathering in synagogues to give thanks. When news of Lincoln's death arrived, the synagogue altars were quickly draped in black and, instead of Passover melodies, the congregations chanted Yom Kippur hymns. Lincoln had been protective of American Jewry, overturning General Grant's infamous General Order #11 expelling Jews from the Department of the Tennessee and supporting legislation allowing Jewish chaplains to serve in the military.

April 15

2013 – The Boston Marathon bombing was a terrorist attack, followed by subsequent related shootings, that occurred when two pressure cooker bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Six died in the events, and 280 injured, some with loss of legs and arms.

April 16
73 – Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the Great Jewish Revolt.
1947 – French freighter S.S. Grandcamp explosion loaded with ammonium nitrate docked at the Port of Texas City, Texas, and erupted in flames, causing a massive explosion that killed at least 581 people.
1995 – George W. Bush names April 16 as Selena Day in Texas, after she was killed two weeks earlier.

2007 – Virginia Tech shooting: Seung-Hui Cho guns down 32 people and injures 17 before dying by suicide.

April 17

1961 – Bay of Pigs Invasion: A group of Cuban exiles financed and trained by the CIA lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.
1978 – Mir Akbar Khyber is assassinated, provoking a communist coup d'état in Afghanistan.
1984 – Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher is killed by gunfire from the Libyan People's Bureau (Embassy) in London during a small demonstration outside the embassy. Ten others are wounded. The events lead to an 11-day siege of the building.
2006 – A Palestinian suicide bomber detonates an explosive device in Tel Aviv, killing 11 people and injuring 70.

April 18

1775 – American Revolution: The British advancement by sea begins; Paul Revere, William Dawes (above) and other riders warn the countryside of the troop movements. (The syncinematic film, 2009's Knowing has student Caleb Koestler - a name game there - going to the fictional William Dawes Elementary, located in 1959 Lexington.)
1906 – An earthquake and fire destroy much of San Francisco, California.
1983 – A suicide bomber destroys the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people.
2007 – A series of bombings, two of them being suicides, occur in Baghdad, killing 198 and injuring 251.
2013 – A suicide bombing in a Baghdad cafe kills 27 people and injures another 65.
2013 – Fertilizer plant explosion, West, just north of Waco, Texas, killed 15 killed and about 200 injured. Eighty homes and a middle school are leveled.

April 19

Blood Sacrifice to the Beast. Fire sacrifice is required for this specific date.
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.

April 21 
1506 – The three-day Lisbon Massacre comes to an end with the slaughter of over 1,900 suspected Jews by Portuguese Catholics.
1985 – The compound of the militant group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord surrenders to federal authorities in Arkansas after a two-day government siege.

April 22 
2004 – Two fuel trains collide in Ryongchon, North Korea, killing up to 150 people.
2013 – Six people die in a shooting in Belgorod, Russia.
2013 – The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrest and charge two men with plotting to disrupt a Toronto area train service in a plot claimed to be backed by Al-Qaeda elements.
2014 – More than 60 people are killed and 80 are seriously injured in a train crash in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Katanga Province.
2016 – The one-month anniversary of three suicide bombers killing 35 people and injuring 316 in the 2016 Brussels bombings at the airport and at the Maelbeek/Maalbeek metro station.

April 23
303 – Saint George, Roman soldier and martyr (b. 275) dies
St George's Day (England) and its related observances
1343 – St. George's Night Uprising commences in the Duchy of Estonia.
1968 – Timothy James McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in 1995, on April 19, was born. He is executed on June 11, 2001.

April 24
1184 BC – Traditional date of the fall of Troy.

April 25
1946 – Naperville train disaster kills 47 in Naperville, Illinois.

1965 – Teenage sniper Michael Andrew Clark kills three and wounds six others shooting from a hilltop along Highway 101 just south of Santa Maria, California.
2005 – One hundred seven people die in Amagasaki rail crash in Japan.
2010 – Joseph McVey, 23, from Ohio, is arrested with a shotgun, in a car made to look like a police vehicle with working lights and sirens in the Asheville, NC airport parking lot, when President Obama and his family were departing in Air Force One.

April 26
1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia.
1894 – Birthdate of Rudolf Walter Richard Heß, also spelled Hess, who was a prominent politician in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, he served in this position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland. Neo-nazi "celebrations" have been held for him in Germany, on the date of his death, August 17, but some indications are that his birthdate is acknowledged, as well.
1982 – Fifty-seven people are killed by former police officer Woo Bum-kon in a shooting spree in South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea.
2002 – Robert Steinhäuser, 19, infiltrates the Gutenberg-Gymnasium (a secondary school) in Erfurt, Germany. He stalked the halls, and killed 12 teachers, an administrator, two students, one policeman, and wounded 10 other people before he killed himself. Seventeen people in total died.

April 27
711 – Islamic conquest of Hispania: Moorish troops led by Tariq ibn Ziyad land at Gibraltar to begin their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula (Al-Andalus).
1805 – First Barbary War: United States Marines and Berbers attack the Tripolitan city of Derna (The "shores of Tripoli" part of the Marines' Hymn).
2011 – The April 25–28 tornado outbreak devastates parts of the Southeastern United States, especially the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee. Two hundred five tornadoes touched down on April 27 alone, killing more than 300 and injuring hundreds more.
2012 – At least four explosions hit the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk with at least 27 people injured.
2014 – A tornado outbreak over much of the eastern United States kills 35 people.

April 28
1192 – Assassination of Conrad of Montferrat (Conrad I), King of Jerusalem, in Tyre, two days after his title to the throne is confirmed by election. The killing is carried out by Hashshashin.
1949 – The Hukbalahap are accused of assassinating former First Lady of the Philippines Aurora Quezon, while she is en route to dedicate a hospital in memory of her late husband; her daughter and ten others are also killed.
1978 – President of Afghanistan, Mohammed Daoud Khan, is overthrown and assassinated in a coup led by pro-communist rebels.
1996 – Port Arthur massacre, Tasmania: A gunman, Martin Bryant, opens fire at the Broad Arrow Cafe in Port Arthur, Tasmania, killing 35 people and wounding 23 others.

April 29
1429 – Joan of Arc (tied to name game, Fay/Fairy/Beech) arrives to relieve the Siege of Orleans.
1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler marries his longtime partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker and designates Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor. Both Hitler and Braun died by suicide the following day.

April 30
1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun die by suicide after being married for less than 40 hours. Soviet soldiers raise the Victory Banner over the Reichstag building. 

2009 – Eight people are killed and another ten injured at a Queen's Day parade in Netherlands in an attempted assassination on Queen Beatrix and members of the Royal Family. The attack occurred at the De Naald (in English The Needle), which is the obelisk monument in the Dutch city of Apeldoorn. The car of the assailant, identified as Richard Karst Tates, ended up crashed at the base of the obelisk.

2009 – Azerbaijan State Oil Academy shooting: Twelve people were killed (students and staff members) by an armed attacker.

Beltaine Festival - April 30-May 1. Walpurgis Night. This is the highest day on the Druidic Witch's Calendar. May 1 is the Illuminati's second most sacred holiday. Human sacrifice is required.

+++++++++++++++++

Brazil's Columbine: Ten Dead in School Shooting

Two former students opened fire at a Suzano, Brazil school on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, and killed at least six teenagers as well as two school officials before dying by suicide in an attack that police said was inspired by the 1999 Columbine massacre in the United States. The two armed men were wearing face masks or hoods. They shot and killed the six children who were on their snack break, as well as two school officials, before fatally turning their guns on themselves.

They reportedly were carrying firearms, crossbows, and homemade bombs.

The gunmen have been identified as Guilherme Taucci Monteiro, 17 years old, and Luiz Henrique de Castro, 25 years old. Monteiro (pictured) posted images of himself on Facebook shortly before the attack.

Before entering the Raul Brasil School in Suzano near Sao Paulo, the former pupils shot and killed the younger assailant's uncle, who owned a car rental agency where they stole a vehicle.

Ten people, including the two attackers, were therefore killed in total, Sao Paulo police said. The students who were killed were boys mostly 15 and 16 years old.

h/t Rodrigo Craveiro

+++

A Columbine copycat? A few media accounts in Brazil are discussing this school shooting as a copycat of the 1999 Columbine attack, which involved two young men with multiple fatalities. But this date is filled with anniversaries.

March 13, 1943, is the date on which the Nazis liquidated the Jewish ghetto in Kraków, Poland.

This Brazilian shooting occurred on the anniversary of the Dunblane shooting in Scotland where 16 youth and a teacher were killed, ending in the suicide of the gunman. On March 13, 1996, Thomas Watt* Hamilton, a local Stirlingshire man, shot dead 16 children and their teacher, Gwen Mayor, in Dunblane Primary School's gymnasium before killing himself. He used his licensed weapons and ammunition.

This is not the first mass school shooting in Brazil. On the morning of April 7, 2011, twelve children aged between 12 and 14 were killed and 12 others seriously wounded by an armed man who entered Tasso da Silveira Municipal School (Escola Municipal Tasso da Silveira), an elementary school in Realengo on the western fringe of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In 2015, there was a fatal school incident in Spain. 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. Since it occurred on April 20, 2015, a direct Columbine date copycat. See my analysis here.

While the Columbine High School shootings on April 20, 1999, became the modern template for school shootings, as noted in great detail in my 2004 book, The Copycat Effect, the "modern era" of school shootings began in the USA on February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington.

The new pattern that was shown in that shooting was of a male student (not an outsider) entering the school and killing his classmates and teachers. In the Moses Lake event, Barry Loukaitis, 14, in this Columbine precusor, dressed all in black, including a long coat (apparently more of a Western duster than a trenchcoat), held his algebra class hostage, killed two students, wounded another severely, and killed his algebra teacher, Leona Caires.

Loukaitis then turned to the class and said "This sure beats algebra, doesn't it?"

The quotation was nearly a direct one taken from a Stephen King book, Rage, about a school shooting of an algebra teacher that Loukaitis allegedly used as the model for his attack. The first novel by Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1977. King withdrew the book from publication three years later, after Columbine.

What subject did the Brazilian adults who were killed teach? The Brazilian shooters were students of mass violence.

Loukaitis had planned the shootings carefully, getting ideas, he said, from the Stephen King book Rage (1977). In it, a troubled high school boy takes a gun to fictional Placerville High School, kills his algebra teacher “Mrs. Underwood,” another school adult “Mr. Vance,” and takes the algebra classhostage. Police would find a collection of Stephen King's books in Loukaitis' bedroom, including his well-worn copy of Rage.

The Rage scenario had been played out before in real life. At Valley High School, Las Vegas, Nevada, on March 19, 1982, after algebra teacher Clarence Piggot refused to cancel a public speaking assignment; 17-year-old Patrick Lizotte gunned him down. Patrick also wounded two other 17-year-old students during his rampage. He left the school and was killed nearby during a shootout with the police. On January 18, 1993, Scott Pennington, 17, took his senior English class captive at East Carter High School, in Grayson, Kentucky. He killed his teacher and a custodian. Pennington would tell investigators later that he only read Rage after the shooting. In 1997, Rage would be linked to another shooting. A copy of Rage was found in the locker of Michael Carneal, a high school shooter in West Paducah, Kentucky.

Stephen King discussed the role of Rage after the Loukaitis shootings and eventually King apologized for writing the book, saying he penned it during a troubling period in his life. He said he wished it never had been published. Finally in 1999, he told his publisher to pull it from publication and took it out-of-print. He told the Today Show’s Katie Couric: “I took a look at Rage and said to myself, if this book is acting as any sort of accelerate, if it’s having any effect on any of these kids at all, I don’t want anything to do with it, regardless of what may be the moral and legal rights and wrongs. Even talking about it makes me nervous.”

______

* In The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirit, Jim Brandon writes, regarding the overall "name game":

I'm not talking here of such spooky tongue-twisters as H.P. Lovecraft's Yog-Sothoth or Arthur Machen's Ishakshar, but of quite ordinary names like Bell, Beall and variants, Crowley, Francis, Grafton, Grubb, Magee/McGee, Mason, McKinney, Montpelier, Parsons, Pike, Shelby, Vernon, Watson/Watt, Williams/Williamson. I have others on file, but these are the ones which I have accumulated the most instances.

Emphasis added. ~ Loren Coleman 

The Most Dangerous Time of Year

The April 2, 2018, issue of Time has on the cover the image of five of the student survivors who organized the March for Our Lives. They are among the twenty students who cofounded Never Again MSD (MSD refers to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School) in the wake of the death of 17 on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2018.

Details about each of the pictured individuals are to be found in "The New Children's Crusade," that I wrote on March 2.

Jaclyn Corin, Alex Wind, Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, and David Hogg

The March for Our Lives was a student-led demonstration that took place on March 24, 2018, in Washington, D.C., with over 800 sibling events throughout the United States and around the world. According to data from Getty Images, more than 830 demonstrations took place.

With two million marching across the United States, it was the largest student protest in American history, one of the largest marches on Washington in history, and the second largest march in American history, with millions more estimated to have marched throughout the world.

Wikipedia summarizes the rally, thusly:

The speakers—all of whom were high schoolers or younger—included Marjory Stoneman Douglas students Cameron Kasky, David Hogg, Delaney Tarr, Sarah Chadwick, Alex Wind, Jaclyn Corin, Ryan Deitsch, Aalayah Eastmond, Sam Fuentes, and Emma González. Other participants included Naomi Wadler, who is an elementary school student in Alexandria, Virginia​, Trevon Bosley from Chicago whose brother was shot and killed leaving church, Edna Chavez, a high school student from Los Angeles, and Zion Kelly, whose twin brother was shot and killed during an armed robbery. Yolonda Reene King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., also made an appearance along with Mya Middleton, a student from Chicago, Matt Post, a senior from Montgomery County, Christopher Underwood, an 11-year old from New York, Alex King and D'Angelo McDade from Chicago, and Matthew Soto, brother of Sandy Hook victim Victoria Soto.
González, after briefly speaking and naming the 17 victims, stood silent for over four minutes, after which a cellphone alarm went off and she announced that it was the six minute and twenty second point in her speech, equal to the length of the Parkland shooting. Her speech and emotional moment of silence was praised by many media organizations as one of the "most memorable" and "powerful" moments in the day's events. González ended her speech by saying:

Since the time that I came out here, it has been 6 minutes and 20 seconds, The shooter has ceased shooting, and will soon abandon his rifle, blend in with the students as they escape, and walk free for an hour before arrest. Fight for your lives before it's someone else's job. [The footnote is #237, thus giving this quote a bit of cryptokubrology magic. ~ Loren]

Singers Ariana Grande, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Platt, Miley Cyrus, Jennifer Hudson, Andra Day, Common, and Demi Lovato joined student-led marchers in Washington, D.C. Source.

The next mass student demonstration comes on April 20, 2018, the anniversary date of Columbine (1999). Traditionally, this week in April has is the most dangerous week of the year for school shootings and mass violence. 

The Red Zone of April: A Dangerous Time

April 14-5

1865 – On the eve of the fifth day of Passover, April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot and died of his wounds in the early morning of April 15th, which had already been scheduled as a national day of prayer to mark the end of the Civil War. Jews across the land were gathering in synagogues to give thanks. When news of Lincoln's death arrived, the synagogue altars were quickly draped in black and, instead of Passover melodies, the congregations chanted Yom Kippur hymns. Lincoln had been protective of American Jewry, overturning General Grant's infamous General Order #11 expelling Jews from the Department of the Tennessee and supporting legislation allowing Jewish chaplains to serve in the military.

April 15

2013 – The Boston Marathon bombing was a terrorist attack, followed by subsequent related shootings, that occurred when two pressure cooker bombs exploded during the Boston Marathon on Boylston Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Six died in the events, and 280 injured, some with loss of legs and arms.

April 16
73 – Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the Great Jewish Revolt.
1947 – French freighter S.S. Grandcamp explosion loaded with ammonium nitrate docked at the Port of Texas City, Texas, and erupted in flames, causing a massive explosion that killed at least 581 people.
1995 – George W. Bush names April 16 as Selena Day in Texas, after she was killed two weeks earlier.

2007 – Virginia Tech shooting: Seung-Hui Cho guns down 32 people and injures 17 before dying by suicide.

April 17

1961 – Bay of Pigs Invasion: A group of Cuban exiles financed and trained by the CIA lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.
1978 – Mir Akbar Khyber is assassinated, provoking a communist coup d'état in Afghanistan.
1984 – Police Constable Yvonne Fletcher is killed by gunfire from the Libyan People's Bureau (Embassy) in London during a small demonstration outside the embassy. Ten others are wounded. The events lead to an 11-day siege of the building.
2006 – A Palestinian suicide bomber detonates an explosive device in Tel Aviv, killing 11 people and injuring 70.

April 18

1775 – American Revolution: The British advancement by sea begins; Paul Revere, William Dawes (above) and other riders warn the countryside of the troop movements. (The syncinematic film, 2009's Knowing has student Caleb Koestler - a name game there - going to the fictional William Dawes Elementary, located in 1959 Lexington.)
1906 – An earthquake and fire destroy much of San Francisco, California.
1983 – A suicide bomber destroys the United States embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 63 people.
2007 – A series of bombings, two of them being suicides, occur in Baghdad, killing 198 and injuring 251.
2013 – A suicide bombing in a Baghdad cafe kills 27 people and injures another 65.
2013 – Fertilizer plant explosion, West, just north of Waco, Texas, killed 15 killed and about 200 injured. Eighty homes and a middle school are leveled.

April 19

Blood Sacrifice to the Beast. Fire sacrifice is required for this specific date.
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.

April 21 
1506 – The three-day Lisbon Massacre comes to an end with the slaughter of over 1,900 suspected Jews by Portuguese Catholics.
1985 – The compound of the militant group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord surrenders to federal authorities in Arkansas after a two-day government siege.

April 22 
2004 – Two fuel trains collide in Ryongchon, North Korea, killing up to 150 people.
2013 – Six people die in a shooting in Belgorod, Russia.
2013 – The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrest and charge two men with plotting to disrupt a Toronto area train service in a plot claimed to be backed by Al-Qaeda elements.
2014 – More than 60 people are killed and 80 are seriously injured in a train crash in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Katanga Province.
2016 – The one-month anniversary of three suicide bombers killing 35 people and injuring 316 in the 2016 Brussels bombings at the airport and at the Maelbeek/Maalbeek metro station.

April 23
303 – Saint George, Roman soldier and martyr (b. 275) dies
St George's Day (England) and its related observances
1343 – St. George's Night Uprising commences in the Duchy of Estonia.
1968 – Timothy James McVeigh, who blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building in 1995, on April 19, was born. He is executed on June 11, 2001.

April 24
1184 BC – Traditional date of the fall of Troy.

April 25
1946 – Naperville train disaster kills 47 in Naperville, Illinois.

1965 – Teenage sniper Michael Andrew Clark kills three and wounds six others shooting from a hilltop along Highway 101 just south of Santa Maria, California.
2005 – One hundred seven people die in Amagasaki rail crash in Japan.
2010 – Joseph McVey, 23, from Ohio, is arrested with a shotgun, in a car made to look like a police vehicle with working lights and sirens in the Asheville, NC airport parking lot, when President Obama and his family were departing in Air Force One.

April 26
1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia.
1894 – Birthdate of Rudolf Walter Richard Heß, also spelled Hess, who was a prominent politician in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, he served in this position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland. Neo-nazi "celebrations" have been held for him in Germany, on the date of his death, August 17, but some indications are that his birthdate is acknowledged, as well.
1982 – Fifty-seven people are killed by former police officer Woo Bum-kon in a shooting spree in South Gyeongsang Province, South Korea.
2002 – Robert Steinhäuser, 19, infiltrates the Gutenberg-Gymnasium (a secondary school) in Erfurt, Germany. He stalked the halls, and killed 12 teachers, an administrator, two students, one policeman, and wounded 10 other people before he killed himself. Seventeen people in total died.

April 27
711 – Islamic conquest of Hispania: Moorish troops led by Tariq ibn Ziyad land at Gibraltar to begin their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula (Al-Andalus).
1805 – First Barbary War: United States Marines and Berbers attack the Tripolitan city of Derna (The "shores of Tripoli" part of the Marines' Hymn).
2011 – The April 25–28 tornado outbreak devastates parts of the Southeastern United States, especially the states of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee. Two hundred five tornadoes touched down on April 27 alone, killing more than 300 and injuring hundreds more.
2012 – At least four explosions hit the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk with at least 27 people injured.
2014 – A tornado outbreak over much of the eastern United States kills 35 people.

April 28
1192 – Assassination of Conrad of Montferrat (Conrad I), King of Jerusalem, in Tyre, two days after his title to the throne is confirmed by election. The killing is carried out by Hashshashin.
1949 – The Hukbalahap are accused of assassinating former First Lady of the Philippines Aurora Quezon, while she is en route to dedicate a hospital in memory of her late husband; her daughter and ten others are also killed.
1978 – President of Afghanistan, Mohammed Daoud Khan, is overthrown and assassinated in a coup led by pro-communist rebels.
1996 – Port Arthur massacre, Tasmania: A gunman, Martin Bryant, opens fire at the Broad Arrow Cafe in Port Arthur, Tasmania, killing 35 people and wounding 23 others.

April 29
1429 – Joan of Arc (tied to name game, Fay/Fairy/Beech) arrives to relieve the Siege of Orleans.
1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler marries his longtime partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker and designates Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor. Both Hitler and Braun died by suicide the following day.

April 30
1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun die by suicide after being married for less than 40 hours. Soviet soldiers raise the Victory Banner over the Reichstag building. 

2009 – Eight people are killed and another ten injured at a Queen's Day parade in Netherlands in an attempted assassination on Queen Beatrix and members of the Royal Family. The attack occurred at the De Naald (in English The Needle), which is the obelisk monument in the Dutch city of Apeldoorn. The car of the assailant, identified as Richard Karst Tates, ended up crashed at the base of the obelisk.

2009 – Azerbaijan State Oil Academy shooting: Twelve people were killed (students and staff members) by an armed attacker.

Beltaine Festival - April 30-May 1. Walpurgis Night. This is the highest day on the Druidic Witch's Calendar. May 1 is the Illuminati's second most sacred holiday. Human sacrifice is required.

+++++++++++++++++

Bridget Brown of Toronto's Canadian TV online edition wrote the following on October 4, 2006:

Coleman says violent offenders, intent on shocking the public, sometimes "compete for the highest body count."...the copycat crimes will likely slow down as we near winter. He says spring, and the anniversary of Columbine, could be enough to spark another cycle of tragedy.

Here's a snippet from Montana's Daily Inter Lake, for October 5, 2006:

There is also the influence of cable news to be accounted for, as wall-to-wall coverage of shootings and murder could easily sway sick minds to think of killers as culture heroes. Indeed, researcher Loren Coleman believes copycats imitate previous violent attacks on a regular basis. He says school attacks follow a pattern after a media event in a day, a week, two weeks, a month, a year, or 10 years. "Vulnerable humans have internal media clocks," he maintains.

"Killers often pick special dates for their attack," April 17, 2009 by Trish Crawford, in Toronto Star

...Loren Coleman is worried, because mass killers often choose special dates and anniversaries for their carnage. The killers at Columbine did, by picking the birthday of one of history's monsters.
The author of The Copycat Effect (Simon & Schuster) says the amount of attention this anniversary gets may determine whether any other disaffected males bent on vengeance pick April 20 for their act of destruction.
"Anniversaries can be dangerous," Coleman says. "These individuals compete with each other."
...Coleman called schools "a fish bowl setting with a vulnerable population."
...The killers are uniformly "homicidal, suicidal, sexually dysfunctional males" who feel powerless and blame others for their problems. Attacking school students – young girls are favored targets – makes these people feel powerful and strong, Coleman says.

Michael Hoffman III, being interviewed for "Cereal Murder and the Group Mind" in 2000, notes:

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. 

April 20 Equals Danger

In 2016, the coroner took away Chyna, and TMZ rushed to be the first to publish the photos on April 20th. The date did not live down its reputation.

2016

Joan Marie Laurer (born December 27, 1970), an American professional wrestler, entertainment film actress, and bodybuilder, who changed her name legally to her ring name Chyna, was discovered dead on April 20, at the age of 45.

On April 20, 2016, Laurer was found dead at her home in Redondo Beach, California. Her manager Anthony Anzaldo had grown concerned when Laurer did not post updates or content to her usual social media outlets for several days and subsequently found her body in her apartment. 

Her brain has been donated to science to study the effects of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

A report of her autopsy was released in December 2016. Laurer died on April 17 of an overdose of alcohol, combined with anxiety drugs, painkillers, and sleep aids.

What occurred on Apri 20, 2017 in Paris, Seattle, and St. Louis:

• 2017 – One police officer is killed by shooting attack at the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Two police officers were shot in a blotched 7/11 robbery in Seattle. The suspect was killed.

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, Missouri...

A gunman opened fire on two Laclede Gas workers, killing them, and then turned the gun on himself Thursday morning, dying by suicide.

(KMOV)

American Anarchist: Are We What We Write?

The Internet Movie Database describes the American Anarchist, which was released on October 8, 2016, thusly: "The story of one of the most infamous books ever written, The Anarchist Cookbook, and the role it's played in the life of its author, now 65, who wrote it at 19 in the midst of the counterculture upheaval of the late '60s and early '70s."

The documentary is directed and written by Charlie Siskel, whom the media love to mention is the nephew of the late movie critic Gene Siskel. Maybe Charlie enjoys noting that fact in interviews too, but I doubt it.

The main interview subject of the documentary is William Powell, the author of The Anarchist Cookbook (1970).

=====

=====

William Powell at 65

William Powell at 19 with his book cover and a partly visible Lyle Stuart.

If you are not one to watch documentaries but you enjoy thoughtful insights about the state of your impact on others through the decisions you make, watch this film.

I want you to see Siskel's movie, to get the full power of his delivery. The director/writer handles the delicate issue of "blame" well.

Indeed, I must say, American Anarchist has one of the most remarkable, self-reflective endings I've ever seen in a documentary. I've watched a lot of nonfiction features because I taught a documentary credit course at the University of Southern Maine for 23 semesters, from 1989 through 2003.

Being a student of the copycat effect, this film does a skilled job pointing out that Powell's book can be directly tied to several instances of violence that track directly back to The Anarchist Cookbook.

As the Daily Beast notes these events include, 

Croatian separatists who planted a bomb in Grand Central Terminal and hijacked TWA Flight 355 in 1976; a series of abortion clinic bombings in the 1980s; the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995; the Columbine High School massacre in 1999; the 7/7 London bombings; the 2011 Tucson shooting targeting U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords; the Boston Marathon bombing; and the Aurora shooting in 2012 during The Dark Knight Rises.

The list in the film is longer than the summary above. Powell seemed especially disturbed when he first heard about the school shooting involving Karl Pierson. On December 13, 2013, Pierson, an 18-year-old student, entered the Arapahoe High School in Centennial, Colorado (down the road from Columbine), armed with a shotgun, a machete, three Molotov cocktails, and 125 rounds of ammunition. He requested to see the school librarian, who was also the coach of the school debate team. The shooter's demotion on the team was a contributing motive to the shooting. One student was shot in the head and died eight days later. The shooter attempted to start a fire with one of the devices he had carried with him and then shot himself in the head.

NBC News, as did other media outlets, reported:

Joe Redmond, who at one time was a co-captain on the team with the suspected gunman, Karl Pierson, said that Pierson had been reading The Anarchist Cookbook....

Soon after hearing about this link, Powell wanted his book withdrawn from circulation.  He made a major statement about this in The Guardian in December 2013. But why did it take so long? 

What is so telling is that Powell had not heard about the widespread influence - before 2013 - of his book, or so he says. Charlie Siskel's questioning, while harsh to some, is revealing and what any good investigative journalist should do.

As I was watching this documentary, I reflected on what was Powell thinking and saying versus how proud I was of several of the books I have written that have inspired people creatively and passionately. Even in my writing of Suicide Clusters (Faber and Faber, 1987) and The Copycat Effect (Simon and Schuster, 2003), I pushed the envelope about violence, asking the media to consider what they were doing as they went down a graphic path regarding violence. If a school shooter had ever been found with a copy of The Copycat Effect in their backpack, I would have had not regrets, which William Powell did for writing The Anarchist Cookbook. 

We should all be forced to face up to the ramifications of our works, in the end.

<><><><>

On a side trek in the film, American Anarchist details a bit of background on The Anarchist Cookbook's publisher, which was a surprise.

Lyle Stuart, whose obituary I wrote immediately about after I learned he died on June 24, 2006, was part of William Powell's documentary story.

Lyle Stuart published The Strange World of Frank Edwards: A Selection of His Best Writings on Inexplicable and Mysterious True Events complied by the publisher’s son, Rory, in 1977, ten years after Edwards’ death.

It was William Powell's and Frank Edwards’ publisher, the maverick Lyle Stuart, who died of a heart attack at his home in Fort Lee, New Jersey, on the significant date of June 24, 2006. (Fort Lee is the former home of the late ufologist satirist James Moseley, btw. Obviously, merely another "coincidence.")

Few in the mainstream press made much of the date upon which Lyle Stuart died, or the fact that some of his first works published were not the books (like The Anarchist Cookbook) discussed in the obituaries, but tomes on Fortean wonders, Bigfoot, and flying saucers. But I remembered.

The New York Times’ more standard Lyle Stuart obituary, by Anthony Ramirez, for June 26, 2006, is partially recorded here, deals with The Anarchist Cookbook immediately:

Lyle Stuart, a renegade journalist and publisher whose picaresque life included clashes with Walter Winchell, the publication of Naked Came the Stranger and the decision to print The Anarchist Cookbook, died on Saturday [June 24, 2006] at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in Englewood, N.J. He was 83 and lived in Fort Lee, N.J.

The cause of death was a heart attack, said his wife, Carole.

In his first career as a journalist in the 1940’s and 50’s, Mr. Stuart clashed with the powerful columnist Walter Winchell and supported Fidel Castro. In his second, as a publisher, he was notorious for The Anarchist Cookbook. Written by William Powell, the book, which included instructions on making bombs and homemade silencers for pistols, was first released in 1970 at the height of antiwar and anti-establishment protests. Web sites inspired by the book are still proliferating.

Mr. Stuart published the book against his own staff’s wishes. "I liked it, but nobody else did – and of course no other publisher would touch it," he told an interviewer in 1978. In 2000, the author, Mr. Powell, told The Observer of London that he disavowed the book, written when he was 19; later, in an open letter on Amazon.com, he called it "a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted." But Mr. Stuart, who held the copyright, continued to publish it.

He courted controversy again in 1996 when he reissued The Turner Diaries, an anti-government novel self-published by a neo-Nazi in 1978. It is said to have been a favorite of Timothy J. McVeigh, executed for killing 169 people with a truck bomb in Oklahoma City in 1995.

<><><><>

The end of American Anarchist holds a shock for viewers who wait for it.  The Guardian followed up and wrote more about it a few days ago, on March 30, 2017.

The documentary was shot for about a year during 2015 and 2016.

At the end of the film, the viewer is told that William Powell died shortly after filming ended.

The Guardian partially answers the lingering questions Charlie Siskel's open-ended statement on the black screen left with the audience. I immediately thought, "I wonder if he took his own life after being forced to think about his role in the death of some many innocent people?"

Instead, we learn...

The writer suffered a fatal heart attack while on holiday with his family in Nova Scotia on 11 July, at the age of 66....News filtered out at the US theatrical release of documentary American Anarchist, which mentions his death as the film closes.