Two In One Day

Consider this. Copycats are so routine, nowadays, that the media, the public, and law enforcement agencies take it for granted that after a major violent event, more will follow. Following the community college shooting in Roseburg, Oregon on October 1, 2015 (http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2015/10/Umpqua.html), it seemed only a matter of time before more college or university shootings would occur. Despite calmer heads have now largely debunked the almost folkloric "Christians were targeted" part of the story (see here http://news.discovery.com/history/us-history/were-christians-targeted-in-oregon-shooting-151006.htm), the ripples from that event continue having an impact.

The fatal part of the Copycat Effect happened on Friday, October 9, 2015. But this time, two shootings were discussed as if they were the same kind as the Oregon one. On closer examination, they really do not seem to be. First off, in each case, one fatality each (needless to say awful) but it was not ten. In both cases, there are hints that the shootings were specifically targeted.

As the New York Times observed, "Unlike the attack in Oregon and other mass shootings at colleges and schools in recent years, the two on Friday were not so-called active-shooter episodes, but instead appeared to stem from ordinary disputes and altercations that quickly turned violent."

First up was the 1:20 a.m. PDT Friday incident at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. 

One person was killed and three injured.

The shooting occurred in a parking lot outside Mountainview Hall dormitory at the northeast side of the Flagstaff campus.

Colin Brough (above) was allegedly killed by Steven Jones (below).

A freshman, Steven Jones, 18, pulled a gun and shot four male students, killing one. The slain student has been identified as Colin Brough, according to the university’s website.  The injured are Nicholas Prato, Kyle Zientek and Nicholas Piring. The victims were shot multiple times. The victims were all members of the Delta Chi fraternity, the organization said Friday. The suspected gunman was not, the fraternity told CNN.

Later in the day, tragedy hit Texas, outside an apartment complex on the campus of Texas Southern University, police confirm. The site was the Courtyard Apartments on Blodgett at Canfield, and the time around 11:30 a.m. Friday. After the shooting, the three suspects ran inside the building, up to the fourth floor.

Two suspects are in custody, according to HPD. A third suspect remains at large. HPD has not yet released a description.

One shooting victim was taken to the hospital in critical condition, where the person later died. The other person was hit in the upper torso and in the back. They are listed in stable condition at the hospital, media reported.

Meanwhile, the number could have been higher. "Also in the news today, two eerily similar stories about planned school shootings which were thwarted by police or friends of the aspiring mass murderer. One involves a high school in Great Falls, Montana. Another report out of Denver, Colorado also involved a single male gunman on a high school campus," noted Boing Boing.  http://t.co/001D6Zm3he http://t.co/FYmhdnsXnZ

In Montana, The court document said Brock Doty, 17, texted friends he was going to carry out a school shooting. He then next sent a picture of a rifle leaning against the wall and under the picture, it said: "I hide my gun from my family." Great Falls Police detective and school resource officer Cory Reeves testified that he arrested Doty after receiving information of the text conversation. Four rifles were found in his room.

Shootings like these do happened frequently, but the media feels in the contagion factor linked to such incident. 

Were they gang-related? Group violence?

In general, even with the slight facts we do have, these do not seem to be random acts committed on student bodies without regard to the targeted individuals.

Jim Brandon's highlighting of the name "Nicholas" certainly jumps out in the Arizona scenario. 

Likewise, in going over recent violence on the Flagstaff campus, the New York Times noted another "Nicholas/Nichols" name game, for "in late August [2015], two people were shot after a man fired into a crowd near where the shooting on Friday took place. In that case, a university officer responding to a disturbance in the student-housing parking lot saw the man fire and told him to drop the gun, but the man turned toward the officer, the authorities said. The officer fired but missed, and the suspect, identified by the police as Darrius T. Nichols, 20, surrendered. Mr. Nichols was charged with murder after one of the two victims, LaKeytrick Quinn, 24, died. The second victim, a woman, was treated and released." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/us/campus-shootings-texas-arizona.html

Brough is an "interesting surname, of Anglo-Saxon origin, is a locational name from any of the various places so called, of which there are several in Yorkshire, and Derbyshire, as well as elsewhere, deriving from the Olde English pre 7th Century "burh" meaning "fortress". In most cases these are the sites of Roman fortifications. The name is widely distributed, but mainly found in Staffordshire, where the pronunciation is usually "braf". The surname dates back to the early 13th Century (see below). Further recordings include one William de Brugh (1275) in the Hundred Rolls of Norfolk. Variations in the idiom of the spelling include Broghe, Broughe, Brouf, Bruff, and Broffe." Source: https://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Brough

One wonders what names will pop up in the Texas case?

E’Dena Hines: Murdered at the Witching Hour

Update: Another Batman sync

Actress Yvonne Craig, best known for her role as Batgirl in the 1960s' Batman TV series, died at 78 on Monday, August 17, 2015. Craig also played Martha, the green Orion Slave Girl who wanted to kill Captain Kirk, in the third season of Star Trek. Her other guest appearances on TV include The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Fantasy Island, The Mod Squad and The Many Lives of Dobie Gillis. She also starred in two movies opposite Elvis Presley, It Happened at the World's Fair and Kissin' Cousins.

Earlier....

It was 3 am (the real witching hour) and the victim was 33. And it happened near a street with a power name.

E’Dena Hines was found murdered. It became mainstream news because her grandfather by adoption is the actor Morgan Freeman. News reports talk of him as her step-grandfather or god-grandfather. E’Dena was the granddaughter of Morgan’s first wife Jeanette Adair Bradshaw, and Freeman had adopted Bradshaw's daughter, therefore establishing a relationship with Hines that was a close one. For years, Freeman took Hines to film openings, as his plus one.

E’Dena means "of the valley." Hines can mean "of God's Grace," or as a derivative of eidhean, "ivy."

This is Morgan Freeman with E’Dena Hines at the premiere of The Dark Knight Rises.

In 2008, there was talk of The Dark Knight curse, and Freeman almost died in an automobile accident. See here.

It will be recalled that Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward was the focus of the dramatic destruction scene of the Gotham Football Stadium in The Dark Knight Rises.

Back to the weekend...

On August 16, 2015, police responding to a 911 call at about 3 am found 33-year-old E'Dena Hines lying on the street with multiple stab wounds to her chest. She was pronounced dead at Harlem Hospital. Hines, an actress who had appeared on Broadway and on red carpets at Freeman’s side, was stabbed 16 times, officials said. Hines was attacked on West 162 Street near St. Nicholas Avenue, a few buildings from where she lived, law enforcement authorities and other sources reported.

Lamar Davenport (or Lyric, as his rapper name labeled him) was screaming, "Get out, devils! I cast you out, devils! In the name of Jesus Christ, I cast you out" over E’Dena’s copse.

Police said Davenport was in a relationship with Hines.

Was Lyric part of the weird music Illuminati underground?

Despite strange YouTube attempts to tie Morgan Freeman to the Illuminati, there does not seem to be anything but conspiracy speculation in that direction. Anyone can have freckles.

But what of the killing being near St. Nicholas Avenue?

Nicholas: From the Greek name Νικολαος (Nikolaos) which meant "victory of the people."

Jim Brandon wrote me in 2012, that he "wanted to add...to the Names of Power list – Nicholas and permutations (from Old Nick and Santa Claus up)...." 

I mentioned Brandon's and Matthew Bell's article on Nick/Nicholas/Nichols here in 2013.

Police arrested 30-year-old Lamar Davenport, 30, at the scene, and later charged him with second-degree murder. 

Lamar is a word in use as a feminine Arabic name meaning "liquid gold."

The Daily Mirror says that E’Dena had recently returned to NYC after teaching underprivileged youth in Memphis, Tennessee.

Hines was a graduate of NYU's Graduate Acting Program and played Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway in 2012.

She'd left the city to teach in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, but returned to New York in April 2015, to co-star in the indie film Landing Up.

"She was an amazing, incredible, loving human being," the film's director, Daniel Tenenbaum, told The New York Post. Stacey Maltin is also a writer/producer/actor on the film.

In two Batman syncs...

On Saturday, August 15, 2015, Donald Trump made a dramatic entrance at the Iowa State fair, spending time giving rides to children aboard his multi-million dollar helicopter.

After a group of children boarded his helicopter, one nine-year-old child filmed the experience on video.

“Mr. Trump … Are you Batman?” the child asked.

“I am Batman,” Trump replied.

Meanwhile...

Late on Sunday, August 16, 2015, Leonard ("Lenny") Robinson, 51, of Owing Mills, Maryland, known for visiting hospitalized children dressed as Batman, died in a crash on a western Maryland highway after his Batmobile had engine trouble.

He was checking the engine of his Batmobile while standing in the fast lane of eastbound I-70 Sunday night when his car was hit by a Toyota Camry. The crash occurred around 10:30 p.m. near the unincorporated community of Big Pool.

Owing Mills is the home to the Baltimore Ravens' headquarters facility and many companies. The TV program Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser was produced by Maryland Public Television at its studios in Owings Mills; many viewers became familiar with the town as the mailing address of the program. Many people have also become familiar with the town as the mailing address of the weekly automotive series MotorWeek. Local roads can often be seen on the program.

Big Pool, the body of water formed when the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was made, which of course, gave the name to the area. To the south of Big Pool lies Fort Frederick State Park, a restored fort used during the French and Indian War. Also nearby is the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, which lies near Ft. Frederick alongside the Potomac River.

Known as the Route 29 Batman, Robinson had spent the weekend at SummerFest in South Charleston.

Giancola's Rampage

Anthony J. Giancola went on a rampage in Florida on Friday, June 22, 2012. When arrested by police, what he said was to the point:

Anthony J. Giancola...made this declaration, according to Pinellas Sheriff Bob Gualtieri:"You're going to be proud of me because I just killed 10 drug dealers."In Giancola's wake: four people stabbed, two fatally; two people severely beaten; and five others rammed by his car.The rampage, authorities said, began at 5100 35th Way N, a group home for the hearing impaired.Giancola, a 45-year-old former Tampa middle school principal busted for buying crack cocaine five years ago, stabbed four people there, authorities said.Justin Lee Vandenburgh, 27, and Mary Anne Allis, 59, were killed. Two others, both women, were injured.
...At 11:30 a.m., barely a mile and half away, Giancola pulled into the parking lot of Kenvin's Motel, an aged building on Haines Road with white cinderblock walls and peeling shingles and a reputation for prostitution. In two separate rooms, authorities say, Giancola found the motel's owners and beat them with a microwave.

Giancola continued on, crashing through a porch injuring two people, and purposely running over a kid on a bike, trying to back over him. All this until Giancola was arrested after K-9 dogs tracked him to a wooded area at 66th Street and 62nd Avenue North.

The carnage was widespread. The Ledger's Kameel Stanley wrote a long detailed article about the violence.

In terms of the name game, Bill Grimstad has been alerting his correspondents to an especially active "power name" of late: Nicholas. Intriguingly, in the midst of the name behind this outburst, within  Giancola exists Nicholas. 

Here is how those linkages unfold:

Giancola = Italian: from a compound personal name composed of the elements Gian (a short form of Gianni, see below) + Cola (a short form of Nicola; see Nicholas, below).

Gianni = Italian: from the personal name Gianni, a reduced form of Giovanni, Italian equivalent of John.

John = English, Welsh, German, etc.: ultimately from the Hebrew personal name yọ̄hānān ‘Jehovah has favored (me with a son)’ or ‘may Jehovah favor (this child)’. This personal name was adopted into Latin (via Greek) as Johannes, and has enjoyed enormous popularity in Europe throughout the Christian era, being given in honor of St. John the Baptist, precursor of Christ, and of St. John the Evangelist, author of the fourth gospel, as well as others of the nearly one thousand other Christian saints of the name.

Nicholas = English and Dutch: from the personal name (Greek Nikolaos, from nikān ‘to conquer’ + laos ‘people’). Forms with -ch- are due to hypercorrection (see Anthony, below). The name in various vernacular forms was popular among Christians throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, largely as a result of the fame of a 4th-century Lycian bishop, about whom a large number of legends grew up, and who was venerated in the Orthodox Church as well as the Catholic. In English-speaking countries, this surname is also found as an Americanized form of various Greek surnames such as Papanikolaou ‘(son of) Nicholas the priest’ and patronymics such as Nikolopoulos.

Anthony = English: from the personal name Anthony, Latin Antonius. See also Anton. a vernacular form of Latin Antonius in Spanish (Antón), German, Swedish, Czech (Antoň or Anton, short forms of Antonín), and several other languages. This, with its variants, cognates, and derivatives, is one of the commonest European personal names. Many of the European forms have been absorbed into this spelling as American family names; for the forms, see Hanks and Hodges 1988. Spellings with -h-, which first appear in English in the 16th century and in French (as Anthoine) at about the same time, are due to the erroneous belief that the name derives from Greek anthos ‘flower’. The popularity of the personal name in Christendom is largely due to the cult of the Egyptian hermit St. Anthony (ad 251–356), who in his old age gathered a community of hermits around him, and for that reason is regarded by some as the founder of monasticism. It was further increased by the fame of St. Anthony of Padua (1195–1231), who long enjoyed a great popular cult and who is believed to help people find lost things. Source

The city of Pinellas Park, located in central Pinellas County, Florida, was founded by Philadelphia publisher F. A. Davis, who purchased 12,800 acres (52 km²) from Mason and Benjamin Harrison supporter Hamilton Disston around 1911.

Photo at top: BayNews9