Fayette Factor: Pennsylvania Shooting

The "Fayette Factor" is a phrase capturing the surprisingly high numbers of Fortean or inexplicable events, violent incidents, and synchromystic findings linked to places named after one of the USA's Founding Fathers--Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834). It was first documented by researcher and writer William Grimstad, back in 1977, and written about in "Fateful Fayette," Fortean Times, No. 25, Spring 1978. My writings on the topic have followed up and continued with examples for the last 40 years or so.

The word "fay" + "ette" = "fairy" + "little" = little little people.

An etymology view of "Lafayette" notes it can be translated from the French as "the little enchantment," as well as "the little fairy." Joan of Arc at the age of 8 danced around a "fay tree," a "fairy tree," some saying she saw fairies (which links to the French surname from Occitan, "the little beech tree"). Others tell that she heard voices, had visions, and was "enchanted." The name has a long history. Marshal of France Gilbert de La Fayette III, an ancestor of Marquis De Lafayette, led the army of Joan of Arc, in Orléans. The habitation of Lafayette, the location of La Grange, also gets our special attention.

The latest Fayette frenzy occurred on Sunday, January 28, 2018, in Fayette County - one of the poorest, most rural Appalachian counties in Pennsylvania.

At least four people were killed during a shooting motived by a jealous rage at a car wash in suburban Pennsylvania on Sunday, state police said. The shooting at Ed's Car Wash took place shortly before 3 a.m. in the Melcroft community of Saltlick Township, about 55 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Ed Bukovac is the owner of the car wash.

Police initially said five people were killed but later clarified that the suspect is on life support at a local hospital.

Police identified the victims as 27-year-old William Scott Porterfield, 25-year-old Chelsie Lou Cline, 21-year-old Seth William Cline and 23-year-old Courtney Sue Snyder. An unidentified adult female passenger was able to survive the shooting and suffered minor injuries from broken glass.

The shooter -- identified as 28-year-old Timothy O'Brien Smith (pictured above) of Ligonier -- sustained a gunshot wound to the head and is not expected to survive. Police said the gunshot wound may have been self-inflicted.  He allegedly arrived in a Toyota Tacoma and parked on the side of the car wash.

Smith was armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a 9mm handgun and and possessed a 308 rifle, Fayette County District Attorney Richard Bower said. Smith wore a body armor carrier without the ballistic panels and had several magazines of for the AR-15 and 9mm, Bower added.

Fayette Factor: Trump Rally Incidents

Tommy Dimassimo, a child actor jumps on the national political stage.

The increase of violence at Donald Trump rallies has a great deal to do with human psychology (behavior contagion), the copycat effect (thanks to the media's wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump's message of violence) and, covertly, the twilight language behind all of this.

There does seem to be a strange Fayette Factor thread running through some of the incidents getting milestone attention from the media.

Let's look at some of this week's violent events.

March 9, 2016: Fayetteville, North Carolina. Videos show an African American, Rakeem Jones, who reportedly is a student who tutors special needs children, with a white T-shirt leaving Trump’s Wednesday-night rally as the audience boos. He is being led out by men in uniforms that read Sheriff’s Office. Out of nowhere, Jones is punched in the face by a pony-tailed man, who appears to be white, in a cowboy hat, black vest and pink shirt as the crowd begins to cheer. The protester stumbles away, and then is detained by a number of the men in uniforms.

The man throwing the sucker punch is allowed to sit back down and eat his popcorn.

The next day, John McGraw, 78, was charged with assault and disorderly conduct in connection with the incident, Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sean Swain told the Washington Post.

March 11, 2016: Peabody Opera House, St. Louis, Missouri. 

While Donald Trump`s speech was interrupted by protesters several times inside the clashes were almost non-stop between Trump supporters and opponents outside as well. It was a political battle in the streets. The words between Trump supporters and Trump opponents were nasty, divisive and insulting.
Neither side was afraid to ramp up the rhetoric and hate speech. The fights that broke out were broken up by police.
More than 200 anti-Trump demonstrators clashed with Trump supporters who numbered in the thousands. They were standing in a line about four blocks long. The supporters couldn`t get into the Peabody Opera House to see Trump but they heard the speech through speakers outside. Source.

The Peabody Opera House is north of Lafayette Park, St. Louis.

March 11, 2016. University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion, Chicago, Illinois.

With thousands of people already packed into stands and music blaring to warm up the crowd, Donald J. Trump’s campaign abruptly canceled his rally here on Friday night over security concerns as protesters clashed with his supporters inside an arena where he was to speak.

The location is NW of South Lafayette Avenue, Chicago.

Before the evening was over, the streets were filled with fights between both factions.

March 12, 2016. Vandalia, Ohio. It was misreported as "in Dayton, Ohio," because Vandalia is a suburb of Dayton.

Secret Service agents surrounded Donald Trump during a rally in Ohio on Saturday as a man tried rushing the stage, only a day after he canceled an event over what his team said were safety concerns.
Shortly after mocking a protester who was being escorted out of his event outside Dayton, four Secret Service agents jumped onto the stage and surrounded Trump.

The man who tried rushing the stage, Thomas Dimassimo, was later arrested and charged with disorderly conduct and inducing panic, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s office said. It was not clear if he entered a plea or has an attorney. According to records, his next court date is March 14. Source.

Conservative sources and Trump during his Kansas City, Missouri rally the night of March 12, 2016, linked Dimassimo to ISIS but it's a troll's hoax. Dismassimo's mother's name is Faye. Dimassimo is originally from Powder Springs, Georgia. He is a fourth-year acting major at Wright State. According to IMDB.com, Dimassimo was a child actor with roles on the TV shows “Yes, Dear,” “Reno 911!,” and “House of Payne.”

An open carry activist prepares to draw gun on a counter protester, Thomas Dimassimo, at an August 1, 2015, Confederate flag rally in Georgia.

The Fayette link to Vandalia...

On August 17, 1838, Benjamin Wilhelm, a settler from Pennsylvania, settled near the intersection of U.S. Route 40 and US Route 25-A. He built his home and a small general store as a stop and resting place for travelers heading west. The small town began to attract travelers and entrepreneurs, and on February 7, 1848 the town was incorporated as "The Village of Vandalia" with Benjamin Wilhelm as its first mayor. The village was laid out in 38 lots including a church, hotels, blacksmiths shops, a steam sawmill, meat markets, and a carriage shop. It was named after Vandalia, Illinois.

Some records indicate that Benjamin Wilhelm, the town's founder, settled in Vandalia on his way to Vandalia, Illinois. Instead he stopped here and named his new town after his original destination. Others claim that the town was named Vandalia because the National Road was intended to extend to Vandalia, Illinois, but, for a time, it looked as though it would not do so. This doubt resulted in the name being used for a town along the Road in Ohio.

Vandalia, Illinois, is a city in Fayette County, Illinois, United States, 69 miles (111 km) northeast of St. Louis, on the Kaskaskia River.
The Fayette Factor

The word Lafayette consists of the elements fay "fairy," and the diminutive -ette, giving the meaning as, "little 'little people.'"

Lafayette can thus be translated from the French as "the little enchantment," as well as "the little fairy." Joan of Arc, at the age of 8, danced around a "fay tree," a "fairy tree," some saying she saw fairies. Others tell that she heard voices, had visions, and was "enchanted." The name has a long history.

Jim Brandon penned his continuing Fayette thoughts in his 1983 book, The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirit that, indeed, there are "certain numbers entangled with certain phenomena," just as he talked of power names.

Of course, Brandon's special moniker "candidate is the name Fayette and its variants Lafayette and Fayetteville." The Fayette Factor is probably one of the strangest mysteries in American Forteana, first discovered by Brandon, back in 1977, and written about in "Fateful Fayette," Fortean Times, No. 25, Spring 1978.

Namely, the "Fayette Factor" has been the finding of a surprisingly high incidence of Fortean (inexpliable) events linked to places named after one of the USA's Founding Fathers--the Marquis de Lafayette.

(I have earlier detailed the rumors in the wind - and Donald Trump's real fears of his own assassination - here.)

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Fayettenam

While I was in SW Pennsylvania last weekend giving a talk at a conference, I met several people who were from Fayette County, Pennsylvania. One of the most entertaining was a man named Fred, who use to be a policeman for the town of Fayette City in that county.

Fred became the point man to whom all the other law enforcement officers would send reports of UFOs, Bigfoot, and other strange phenomena. He also told me that police and folks called the area Fayettenam, as a way to describe how crazy things got there. 

Of course, due to my interest and what I've written in the past about the "Fayette Factor" - which relates to the surprisingly high incidence of inexpliable events linked to places named after one of the USA's Founding Fathers, the Marquis de Lafayette - I was intrigued by this business of Fayettenam. 

I asked myself, how widespread is the use of Fayettenam?

I was to discover it was shared by many Fayettes, Lafayettes, and Lafayettevilles, around the country.

 ~Urban Dictionary

According to Fred, Fayette County, Pennsylvania's neighboring state's Fayette County and Fayetteville, in West Virginia, must be added to the list. Folks thereabout call the area Fayettenam too.

But the Fayettenam that dominates the Internet, is the city of Fayetteville in North Carolina, which overlaps with a famed military base. See, for instance, this from 2012:
"Sequestration ground zero: 'Fayette-nam,'" in Politico.

As one ex-military individual observed:

When I lived at Ft. Bragg in the late 1970s, Fayettenam referred to the fact that there was a lot of violence being purpetrated by the military that was living on base. Lots of fights, shootings, etc., between the military and the locals. It also referred to a very high crime rate at that time, particularly crime against the military by the residents. It was literally a "battle zone." Source.

But Pennsylvania's Fayettenam is represented, as well. A few years ago, a website, "Dispatches from Fayettenam," carried bizarre stories of crimes from Fayette County, Pennsylvania. They were ones like this:

Connellsville robber who blamed talking cat sentenced to prison
Friday, August 16, 2013
A Fayette County man who allegedly told police a talking cat convinced him to steal a car, rob a bank and ram a police car was sentenced to up to five years in prison and ordered to undergo a mental health assessment.
Judge John F. Wagner Jr. imposed the 2 ½- to 5-year sentence on James Anthony Shroyer, 51, of Connellsville as part of a plea bargain in which Shroyer entered guilty pleas to charges that included aggravated assault, robbery and receiving stolen property.
Shroyer on Thursday asked the judge to order the mental health assessment because he is “seeing things and hearing voices.” At the time of his arrest in March, Shroyer told troopers he embarked on the mini crime spree at the urging of a talking cat, according to a criminal complaint.
Police said Shroyer stole a Chevy Cavalier in Connellsville March 28 and drove it to the First National Bank on Indian Head Road in Springfield Township. He covered his face, entered the bank, pointed a concealed item at a teller and demanded cash.
...
During an interview with troopers at the Uniontown barracks, Shroyer told them a “cat told him to take the car and get the money with the plastic gun.” According to a criminal complaint, Shroyer told the officers he took the Cavalier when the same cat “jumped up on the car and told him to steal it.”
Shroyer told the troopers he rammed the patrol car, according to the complaint, because the “cat was telling him to hit the cops.”

Meanwhile, in Fayette, Alabama, this just occurred:

A Fayette teenager was killed Saturday evening [November 14, 2015] when her car left the roadway and hit a ditch.
Samantha Lauren Watkins, 19, wasn't wearing a seat belt and was pronounced dead at the scene, according to Alabama state troopers. Watkins was driving a 2003 Honda Accord.
The crash occurred at around 6:13 p.m. on Alabama 102 near the 14 mile marker, 16 miles east of Fayette. Source.

Besides, Fayette, this one event also involved the recent power name Samantha (see here) and the old standard Watkins (see here). Then there's the fact the story contained the "Lauren" name too. (Lauren meaning may be "Laurel tree," "sweet of honor" or "victory of wisdom". It can also be derived from "laurel" in Latin meaning "seer of second sight" or gift of prophecy as well as immortality, and superior intelligence. Of course, it is the female version of Loren.)

So, as you travel around the country, at least, watch your back when in a Fayettenam!