The Death Ripple of Sandy Hook: Peter Manfredonia, Newtown, Incels, and Copycats

Update: Manfredonia Captured.

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Peter Manfredonia, 23, wanted for murder.

The Manfredonia Manhunt

Peter Manfredonia, a Newtown native and University of Connecticut student has been accused of killing two men and injuring another. He was looking for a young woman he knew as he carried out his murderous spree, according to the wife of one of his victims. Peter Manfredonia, 23, a senior at the university who is still at large, was looking for the woman before he crossed paths with her neighbor, 62-year-old Ted DeMers, the man’s wife said.

“He was clearly walking to her home with a mission, with a machete in his backpack,” Cyndi DeMers told the Associated Press.

DeMers also said she talked with the woman’s father over the weekend and was told the family had been considering filing for a restraining order against Manfredonia, who had visited the home in the past.

Police believe Manfredonia, whose family they said has a history of mental illness, killed DeMers and another man in separate attacks before fleeing the state with stolen firearms in a stolen car.

After killing DeMers, Manfredonia was then headed to a friend’s house, who also lived in Derby, and allegedly killed the man, identified by cops as 23-year-old Nicholas Eisele. The suspect left that murder scene and allegedly abducted Eisele’s girlfriend and stole a 2016 black Volkswagen Jetta from her home. Authorities later Sunday found the car in New Jersey at the Pennsylvania border. Eisele’s girlfriend was also found unharmed. Manfredonia then crossed the border into Pennsylvanian, where he remained at large on Sunday night.

Manfredonia Meaning. Italian: habitational name from the region of Manfredonia in Apulia, named for Manfredo, king of Sicily.
Manfredo Meaning (Italian), from the Germanic personal name Mag(in)frid, composed of the elements mag(in) 'strength', 'might' + frid 'peace' (common in Lombardic records in the mid- and late 8th century). Manfred is derived from the Germanic elements magan "strength" and frid "peace". This is the name of the main character in Lord Byron's drama Manfred (1817).

Alleged sighting and the killing locations for Peter Manfredonia. Manfredonia was last seen Sunday, May 24, 2020, in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, after he allegedly killed two men and seriously injured another in two separate attacks in Connecticut.

Victim Ted DeMers

Nicholas Eisele

Victims Nicholas Eisele and his girlfriend.

The stolen black 2016 Volkswagen Jetta was recovered at the Travel America truck stop in Knowlton Township, New Jersey, on Sunday, May 24, 2020. Eisele's girlfriend was found in the car, alive. The truck stop photograph is an updated file copy.

The last sighting of Manfredonia was in Pennsylvania. He is shown in the green rectangle.

The walls of Manfredonia's room was a treasure trove of warning signs. No one paid attention.

The father of Peter Manfredonia, the University of Connecticut student wanted in two murders was arrested last month for allegedly groping an underage teen girl he supplied booze to, a police report said. The alleged incident involving Robert Manfredonia, whose son Peter Manfredonia is still at large, occurred on April 10, 2020, the Connecticut Post reported, citing police. The elder Manfredonia is accused of giving alcohol to two teen girls and, after one of the girls left, allegedly touching the other, according to an arrest warrant obtained by the paper. One of the girls told authorities they also smoked weed. Police charged the father, who’s free on $50,000 bond, with sexual assault, risk of injury to a minor and providing alcohol to a minor.

Still at large, police describe Peter Manfredonia as a 6-foot-3 white man who should be considered armed and dangerous.

Manfredonia is a 2015 graduate of Newtown High School and a senior at the University of Connecticut majoring in finance and mechanical engineering, the Connecticut Post reported. Police said that the driver's side of the stolen Jetta car had a bumper sticker on it paying tribute to the 26 victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, which took place in Newtown. Manfredonia once fundraised against gun violence due to his personal involvement in the Sandy Hook massacre.

Adam Lanza and Newtown

On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, 20, came to the Sandy Hook Elementary School and undertook a mass shooting. This event resulted in 27 people (20 children and 6 adults plus the gunman by suicide), to die at the school in Newtown, Connecticut. The gunman had killed his mother before coming to the school.

Although not labeled as such at the time, Adam Lanza appears to have been an "incel."

The Los Angeles Times observed that boys without fathers "are the ones that we need to watch out about. Those account for 26 out of the 27 mass shooters that have killed eight or more since 1949. Those account for almost all your school shooters and almost all your mass shooters. Dylann Roof, Elliot Rodger, Adam Lanza — even the 6-year-old [school shooter] Dedrick Owens had a background of fatherlessness."

According to the special report conducted by the Newtown Police, a search of the Lanza house produced several examples of material that showed Adam Lanza read extensively about school and mass shooters, and on suicides.

The documents listed in that report included:

One of the final items listed elsewhere indicated Lanza also possessed, "Two videos showing suicide by gunshot."

The Sandy Hook school shooting ended with Adam Lanza's self-inflicted death. The police heard the final shot at 9:40:03 a.m.; they believe that it was Lanza shooting himself in the lower rear portion of his head with the Glock 20SF in classroom 10. Lanza's body was found wearing a pale green pocket vest over a black polo shirt, over a black T-shirt, black sneakers, black fingerless gloves, black socks, and a black canvas belt. Other objects found in the vicinity of Lanza include a black boonie hat (a bucket hat with a stiff brim and usually having a camouflage pattern] and thin frame glasses. The Glock was found, apparently jammed, near Lanza, and the rifle was found several feet away from him. A 9 mm SIG Sauer P226, which was not fired during the incident, was found on Lanza's person.

Lanza Copycats

Other shooters have copycatted Adam Lanza.

A school shooting occurred at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, United States, in the Houston metropolitan area, on May 18, 2018. Ten people – eight students and two teachers – were fatally shot and thirteen others were wounded. The suspected shooter was taken into custody and later identified by police as Dimitrios Pagourtzis, a 17-year-old student at the school.

Dimitrios Pagourtzis reportedly studied mass shootings of the past before killing 10 students and teachers and wounding 13 others. A source told ABC News he “used aspects of those (attacks) in his own shooting.”

Mirroring the attacks in Parkland, Florida, the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, and Columbine High school in 1999, Pagourtzis snuck a .38 caliber pistol and Remington shotgun in his black coat and brought it to school Friday morning (May 18) and opened fire before the first bell rang.

William Atchison killed two people on Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 2017, before killing himself in Aztec, New Mexico, in a shooting at Aztec High School, where he had previously been a student. He had used the pseudonym "Elliot Rodger" on several online forums, and praised "the supreme gentleman" (a term Rodger had used to describe himself, which has since been adopted as a moniker by incel communities).

Atchison's online activity included posting pro-Hitler and pro-Trump thoughts on alt-right forums and white nationalist websites like The Daily Stormer under such usernames as "Future Mass Shooter" and "Adam Lanza," and joking about school shootings, in particular the Columbine High School massacre. Via a Steam chat group he was in contact with the perpetrator of the 2016 Munich shooting. He also posted about his frustration with life in rural New Mexico and bleak career prospects. Atchison was also a sysop in Encyclopedia Dramatica, a website he joined when he was 11.

The journey for Peter Manfredonia continues.

Source, among many.

Thanks for Johanna Lenski for pointing out an initial link.

Bridgewater Plaza's WDBJ Shootings: Copycats & Cartoons

It will be on Wednesday, September 9, 2015, on the day of the second anniversary of the Bridgewater Plaza shooting, when the first highest potential copycat window will occur.

In the wake of the Bridgewater Plaza shootings, which left WDBJ cameraman Adam Ward and reporter Alison Parker dead, and Vicki Gardner, the local chamber of commerce director, wounded, there has been in-depth looks at the event and the gunman, Vester Lee Flanagan II (a/k/a Bryce Williams).

Let's look at some of the copycats that built up to this incident, through the political cartoons that have appeared in years and days after similar events.

The mass shootings, in recent years, have resulted in thoughtful, insightful illustrations of the community ethos and, even, mythos surrounding the violence.

Looking back to the Aurora shootings, for example, the image of Batman is often prominent.

Aurora also caused images of theaters to appear in these cartoons, and the other theater shootings have merged with that one.

The 2015 Lafayette shooting has been added as the sequel.

VA Tech, Sandy Hook, Charleston, Bridgewater Plaza/WDBJ - the list becomes overwhelming.

Even a real newspaper cover appears to be cartoonish in this climate.

And the holding of the gun appears programmed from the past - and we find out much of the Bridgewater Plaza shooting was born in the legacy of VA Tech, Columbine, and Charleston.

The copycat effect is strong in this event, sadly. Rick McKee's 2015 post-Bridgewater Plaza cartoon captures the concept well.

And yet, it almost seems as out-of-whack as another story that McKee dealt with in cartoon form in 2008 - down to a similar plaid outfit - a Bigfoot hoax event. Recall, Vester Flanagan wore plaid for his 2015 "media killing."

Which leaves me wondering, what odd stories did Alison Parker work on at WDBJ that have been scrubbed from her archives?

(The following is not Alison Parker, but a typical local - in this case, Channel 7 in Florida - reporter doing the kind of stories they sometimes have to do.)

Dykes Breaks: Aliens To Blame?

Fear porn. Conspiracy theories. False flag. Area 51. Hanger 18. Waco. OKC Bombing. Unabomber. Survivalists. AIDS. Watergate. Bay of Pigs. JFK. Red Dawn events. Newtown. Sandy Hook. Aurora. Lincoln's Assassination. Haymarket. 9/11 Truthers. Birthers.

It is clear a lot is going on. But...

What happened to critical thinking? How did we get here? Actually, some conspiracies are true, like Watergate and the Lincoln Assassination. Some are not. But some people on the edge have lost sight of what is what.

Black helicopters? 

No, Sheriff's helicopters.

Xeni Jardin published this on the 4th of February, "Former pilot and 9/11 conspiracy theorist shoots and kills 2 teen children, then himself."

Jardin wrote that "Philip Marshall has been identified as a former pilot for Eastern and United airlines. He self-published a number of books, including at least two about his 9/11 conspiracy theories: The Big Bamboozle (February 9, 2012) and False Flag 911: How Bush, Cheney and the Saudis Created the Post-911 World (July 29, 2008)."

Meanwhile, on the 5th, in Alabama, a bus driver is dead, a Vietnam Era vet is dead, and a boy - safe today - turning 6 on the 6th - is psychological traumatized.

Charles Allen Poland

And, in the end, what is the media saying is the motive behind the abduction of Ethan?

Neighbours of [Jimmy Lee] Dykes had speculated to the media over the past week that the kidnapping was part of a plan to air certain greviences he had by gaining national prominence.
'Based on our discussions he feels like he has a story that is important to him, although it’s very complex,' said Sheriff Wally Olson of Dale County on Sunday.
Among Dykes's beliefs was that the government was harboring and hiding aliens that threatened to take America's weapons. Source.

The Alabama Hostage Ordeal: A timeline of events

Tuesday 29th January: Jimmy Lee Dykes commandeers an Alabama school bus demanding two children. Bus driver Charles Albert Poland Jr refuses and is fatally shot four times by Dykes. The 65-year-old survivalist takes a 5-year-old boy named only as Ethan to his bunker.

Wednesday 30th January: After having been alerted to kidnapping and now hostage situation, Dale County Sheriff’s Department officials and agents from the FBI begin negotiations with Dkes via a ventilation shaft the gunman has attached to his underground bunker.

 

Thursday 31st January: Experts continue talking to Dykes through a pipe - the only way to contact the bunker. Local community holds candlelit vigils praying for the standoff to end peacefully
Friday 1st February: Young Ethan is said to be crying for his parents. MailOnline reports that Dykes has demanded reporter in exchange for the boy as he wants to air his views
Saturday 2nd February: Saturday: Dykes allows toys and medication to be passed on via a ventilation pipe
Sunday 3rd February: Bus driver Charles Albert Poland Jr is buried amid emotional scenes as it is revealed that Dykes tricked Poland to stop his bus by promising him home-grown vegetables. It is also claimed that Dykes wants to hand over his hostage in exchange for a reporter or prime-time television exposure to tell his story.
Monday 4th February: Law enforcement officials say they are prepared to wait for weeks if not months for Dykes to give up Ethan until the situation deteriorates. Source.

  

H/T to Theo Paijmans and SMiles Lewis.

Red Hook's Mask + Van Incident

Killers in ski-masks, and as clowns, Jokers, and Bane haunt this year.

Masked mass shooters in vans, theaters, malls, and schools are nothing new.

Now comes a report from last week of the old classic masked uncaught potential child kidnapper (akin to the "phantom clowns"), this time from Red Hook, New York.

Sandy Hook, Red Hook.

Masks. White vans.

On December 19, 2012 at approximately 8:41 pm the Red Hook Police Department were dispatched to West Market Street for a report of a suspicious vehicle with the driver wearing a black ski mask.
A parent and her child were traveling Westbound on West Market Street returning home from a school event when she began to notice a white full-sized van she was following was traveling at an extremely slow speed past the schools. The caller stated that when she began to follow the white van he pulled over on Rt. 199 just south of the Red Hook High School. The caller stated that when she and her daughter drove past the white van they notice the driver wearing a dark jacket and wearing a black ski mask. Source.

BTW, some really scary masks are being produced out there.

Thanks to Anonymous for alerting me to this report.

What's Next? Beyond Newtown and the Mayan Calendar

As we all creep towards Friday, and the first week anniversary of the Newtown, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and the alleged end of the Mayan calendar, it is time to pause. To look back and forward.

Counting Victims as Victims, Not Killers' Body Counts

First off, what is wrong with the general ability of people to count? Twenty-six wreaths, twenty-six candles, even twenty-six flares.

But, at Newtown, on that horrific day of violence, 28 people died. Twenty children at the school, six teachers and staff at the school, the shooter's mother at her home, and the shooter by his own hand at the school. Twenty-eight. 28. There is no reason to de-humanize Nancy Lanza and Adam Lanza by not counting them.

Adam Lanza, 20, Death #28.

Adam Lanza, sixth grade.

Bretton Woods

Breaking news today was that Adam Lanza was alone in the days leading up to the Newstown shooting, when his mother had traveled to Bretton Woods Resort, New Hampshire, to take a mini-vacation. Adam Lanza was was unsupervised for two and a half days with his mom’s guns before Friday’s massacre, according to a new report from HLN.

"Nancy Lanza had only just arrived back at her home Thursday evening, following a two-night trip to Bretton Woods, New Hampshire," according to CNN.

HLN reports "that Lanza checked into the Omni Mount Washington Resort at 12:10 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 11, and checked out at 12:27 p.m. on Thursday. The drive between Bretton Woods, NH and Lanza’s hometown of Newtown takes nearly five hours and clocks in at just under 300 miles."

The Mount Washington Hotel and Resort is one in the last surviving New Hampshire grand hotels.

The Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, was recently mentioned on Olive Stone's The Untold History of the United States. Preparing to rebuild the international economic system as World War II was still raging, 730 delegates from all 44 Allied nations gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. The delegates deliberated during 1–22 July 1944, and signed the Agreement on its final day. This historic Bretton Woods conference in 1944 that laid the groundwork for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The hotel was featured in an episode of the television series Ghost Hunters, when it was searched by the TAPS paranormal investigation team on February 6, 2008. I was a guest of Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson at two TAPS conferences held at this elegant hotel, and I spoke in the same grand ballroom where the 1944 Bretton Woods conference occurred. (In 2011, George Soros convened Bretton Woods II.)

Video Games Debate...Again

How about the video games played by Adam Lanza? Over-the-top comments have been posted on the web about Lanza playing various video games nonstop. But the recent concentrated discussion of his alleged obsession with one specific game, according to my consultant CCCC, fails to take into account that "Starcraft is a strategy game and only one of the races even uses guns (the other two are insectoid and psionic). That's the media though."

Coming Copycat Incident At A Sporting Event?

My friend and research associate Jerome Clark passed along the following from Esquire's   Daily Politics Blog by Charles P. Pierce:

Since 9/11, more than a few administrators, coaches and athletes have expressed to me the concern that one of their events may be used for a statement by one of our many sociopaths with a motive, political or otherwise. (This has a little to do with the fact that so many of our athletes have armed themselves.) After all, these are people whose lives depend on regularly scheduled mass events. And, while major events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl are thick with security, the average major college football or basketball game is not, and an incident at one of those would be just as devastating. (Boeheim's teams average over 30,000 people per game.) The people involved in our games have been talking among themselves about this for years. [Syracuse coach Jim] Boeheim wasn't just talking gun policy there. He was talking about workplace violence, and good for him.

I have had similar thought. It does seem fortunate that the USA has not suffered a "Black Sunday"-type terrorist incident, to date, especially after Black Sunday appeared as a novel by Thomas Harris in 1975, and a successful film directed by John Frankenheimer in 1977.

On a smaller scale, I too have been quietly cautioning that the copycat shooters appear to be moving from school, workplace, and postal shootings to church, mall, and theater violence, then returning to school venues, often, as their captive "fishbowl" theaters of murder. These, of course, are frequently followed by the actual purpose of the shooting - the suicide or suicide-by-cop of the shooter. 

I have been aware that sporting events - baseball games, football contests, and other large audience confined stadium events - may be the next "target."

It was especially disturbing to see that in The Dark Knight Rises, it was at a football game where Bane declared the beginning of the chaos that would destroy Gotham City. And then it began there.

I have wondered if a self-fulfilling agent of the media-driven sensationalistic interest in the alleged "End of the World" on Dec. 21 will result in chaotic events on Friday, or blowback frustrated incidents on Dec. 22-23, needless to say, at sporting events, as well as other locations?

I certainly hope not, but I would warn all public safety agencies be on the alert.

Be safe, be aware.

The Copycat Effect Continues

"Suicides, murder-suicides, and murders – the events that are at the core of the most negative projections of the copycat effect -- will remain newsworthy in the eyes of the media in the foreseeable future and will continue to be reported." ~ The Copycat Effect, 2004.

Here is one of my seven recommendations in The Copycat Effect:

The media must cease its graphic and sensationalized wall-to-wall commentary and coverage of violent acts and the details of the actual methods and places where they occur. Photographs of murder victims, tapes of people jumping off bridges, and live shots of things like car chases ending in deadly crashes, for example, merely glamorize these deaths, and create models for others – down to the method, the place, the timing, and the type of individual involved. Even fictional entertainment, such as the screening of The Deer Hunter, provides vivid copycatting stimuli for vulnerable, unstable, angry, and depressed individuals.

History and Hope Again

I am not about to pick sides in a debate that appears to not understand that the solution to lessen future violent incidents like what happened at Newtown will be multifaceted. But it is intriguing to look back at another "Newtown" massacre, and see what happened.

There once was another Newtown in the news. The another New Town is on the other side of the globe. On April 28, 1996, a gunman from New Town, Australia, opened fire on tourists in Port Arthur, Tasmania, killing 35 people and wounded 23 more. It only took the government of Australia less than two week to announce a bipartisan deal to enact gun control measures. There have been no mass killings since then. Source.

The Wall Street Journal for December 18, 2012, published an article entitled, "Guns, Mental Illness and Newtown" by David Kopel. In that article that mentioned the historical context of the focus of my book:

Loren Coleman's 2004 book The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines shows that the copycat effect is as old as the media itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 classic The Sorrows of Young Werther triggered a spate of copycat suicides all over Europe. But today the velocity and pervasiveness of the media make the problem much worse.

For Critics of My Book and This Blog

In my book I spoke to the future critics who would question why I would gather a collection of copycat events:

I know that the copycat effect does not propagate well in an environment in which the hidden is made manifest. Now that we understand and know there is a problem, the protective factor is the realization that there are things that can be done to stop it.
My hope, of course, is that [my] book [and blog] might stir up a much needed debate on the subject and hopefully lead to social change, to a change in how the media handles these stories, to put the brakes on the copycat effect. Our future—our children’s future—is at stake.
It is not too late to change what is going on. In the end, the point of the copycat effect does not lie in the details of the individual incidents but in its spread....
The time has come for someone to say, stop it. Stop sensationalizing the violence. Stop triggering violent behaviors now.