First Fatal School Shooting of 2018

A 15-year-old boy shot 14 people on Tuesday, January 23, 2018, at the Marshall County High School (below) in Benton, Kentucky. The suspect, a student, entered the school at 7:57 a.m. and soon opened fire with a handgun. The first 911 call came in two minutes later, and police were on scene by 8:06 a.m.

The two people killed include a 15-year-old female student, Bailey Nicole Holt​, who died at the scene. Five of the other victims were airlifted to Vanderbilt University Medical Center​ in Nashville, where another student, Preston Ryan Cope​, later died.

The suspect (pictured at top and below) has been identified as Gabe Parker, a freshman and band member at Marshall County High School. 

This shooting is the nation's first fatal school shooting of 2018. 

The suspect will be charged with murder and attempted murder, Kentucky State Police Lt. Michael Webb said.

Marshall County High School is about 30 minutes from Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky, where a 1997 mass shooting killed three and injured five. Michael Carneal, then 14, opened fire there about two years before the fatal attack at Columbine High School in Colorado, ushering in an era when mass school shootings have become much more common.

Meanwhile, yesterday, in the small North Texas town of Italy (pronounced "It'ly"), a 15-year-old girl Noelle “Cricket” Jones was recovering after police said she was shot by a 16-year-old classmate in Ellis County's Italy High School (above) cafeteria on Monday, January 22, 2018, sending dozens of students scrambling for safety.

On Monday, January 22, 2018, Chad Padilla, 16, was taken into custody without incident after the Italy, Texas, shooting​ of a 15-year-old female student in the cafeteria just before 8:00 a.m. with a semi-automatic​ handgun.

Chad Padilla's Facebook Profile Picture.

Auroras

Benton, Kentucky is 15 miles away from Aurora, Kentucky, also in Marshall County.

Italy, Texas is 82 miles away from Aurora, Texas, in Wise County.

Ring of Fire

Are humans effected by tidal forces?

The Pacific Ring of Fire has been very active in the last 24 hours:

Philippines : Mt. Mayon Volcano erupted
Japan: Mt. Kusatsu-Shirane volcano erupted causing an avalanche.
Indonesia: 5.3 or 6.1 Magnitude earthquake jolts Jakarta, Java.
Alaska: 7.9 or 8.2 Magnitude earthquake off the coast of Kodiak, Alaska, causing tsunami warnings.

United States: Two small earthquakes in Missouri, in last few days.

United States: Mount St. Helens, Washington State, placed on "very high" threat level as shockwaves rattle state.

Dene High School Shooting in La Loche

There has been a shooting at Dene High School in La Louche in Saskatchewan, Canada. 

The Shooting

Four people were killed and an alleged shooter was arrested Friday, January 22, 2016, after gunfire erupted at a school in a small town in northern Saskatchewan, Chief Superintendent Maureen Levy of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Friday night.

Levy said authorities received a call about 1 p.m. Friday saying a weapon had been discharged at La Loche Community School in La Loche. Officers went to the school and at 1:47 p.m. arrested a suspect and seized his weapon.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier addressed the nation, saying, "Obviously this is every parent's worst nightmare" and calling it "a terrible, tragic day."

Clearwater River Dene Nation Chief Teddy Clark described the shooting as devastating in an interview with The Star Phoenix.

"Both Clearwater and La Loche, a lot of people are in shock. This is something that you only see on TV most of the time," The Star Phoenix.

The Victims

Teacher Marie Janvier, 23, was confirmed as one of the victims. Her father, Kevin, is the mayor of La Loche.

“He shot two of his brothers at his home and made his way to the school,” said her father Kevin Janvier, adding that Marie was his only child. “I’m just so sad.”

Janvier’s family said they could not believe that Marie had been killed.

“Her smile will light up the room on the darkest day,” said Sandie Janvier in a Facebook message, calling her the “sweetest caring person … We lost a loving sister today.”

Four people were killed by an alleged teenaged shooter Friday in La Loche: (Clockwise from top left): Teacher's assistant Marie Janvier, 21; Teacher Adam Wood, 35; brothers Drayden Fontaine, 13 and Dayne Fontaine, 17. (Source: Facebook)

School shootings are a form of murder-suicides

In my book, The Copycat Effect, I examine the background we see in school shootings in a subsection entitled “Murders as Suicides, Suicides as Murders."

Sigmund Freud conceptualized suicide as the “murder of one’s self.”

Karl Menninger, author of Man Against Himself (1938), wrote, “Is it hard for the reader to believe that suicides are sometimes committed to forestall the committing of murder? There is no doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt of it. Nor is there any doubt that murder is sometimes committed to avert suicide."

La Loche Background

The school provides a prekindergarten to 12th grade education and houses about 900 students in two buildings, the school's Facebook page says. The town has about 2,600 people.

La Loche is a northern village in northwest Saskatchewan. It is located at the end of Highway 155 on the eastern shore of Lac La Loche [literally, lake of the lake] in Canada's boreal forest. La Loche had a population of 2,611 in 2011 and is within the Northern Saskatchewan Administration District. The Dene High School hockey team are the Lakers.

Also known as the Athapaskan peoples, the Dene Nation is a political organization that covers a large geographical area — from present day Alaska to the southern-most tip of North America. The Dene Nation has existed for over 30,000 years, with one language and many dialects: Gwich’in; Sahtu; Deh Cho; Tlicho; and, Akaitcho. 

Chipewyan ethnonym Dënesųłiné, is the language spoken by the Chipewyan people of northwestern Canada. It is categorized as part of the Northern Athabaskan language family. Dënesųłiné has nearly 12,000 speakers in Canada, mostly in Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba and the Northwest Territories, but only has official status in the Northwest Territories alongside 8 other aboriginal languages: Cree, Dogrib, Gwich’in, Inuktitut, Inuinnaqtun, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey and South Slavey.

Most Chipewyan people now use Dene and Dënesųłiné to refer to themselves and their language, respectively. The Saskatchewan communities of Fond-du-Lac, Black Lake, Wollaston Lake and La Loche are a few.

The students at the school are bilingual, speaking English and Denesuline.

A Town With A Bleak History

The annual suicide rate in the Keewatin Yatthe Regional Health Authority is the highest of any health authority in Saskatchewan. The area, which includes La Loche, Buffalo Narrows, Ile a la Crosse and other communities in the province’s northwest, averaged 43.4 suicide deaths per 100,000 people between 2008 and 2012. That’s more than triple the average annual provincial rate of 12.7 suicide deaths per 100,000. The average annual suicide rates in the Saskatoon and Regina Qu’Appelle health authorities were 10.2 and 11.5 per 100,000 people respectively for the same time frame.

La Loche is more than seven hours northwest of the nearest major city, Saskatoon. It is a community with high levels of unemployment and addiction to drugs and alcohol and a reputation as a tough town. In 2011, two Mounties were forced to barricade themselves into the local health clinic when a mob attacked them after incorrectly assuming that the officers had beaten a man who had been injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. A police truck was also burned, and an ambulance badly damaged. When La Loche appears in the provincial news media, it is usually in connection with violence or drug arrests.

But looming over the town, whose residents are predominately Dene Indians, are sporadic waves of suicides, including one last year. Eighteen people, most of them young, killed themselves from August 2005 to January 2010 in La Loche, which has a population of about 2,600....

Laurence Thompson, a sociologist in Saskatoon who has worked with the native friendship council in La Loche for several years, said that while the town’s lakeside setting in the boreal forest was spectacular, its poverty was immediately apparent. Despite being the hub for nearby communities with a combined population of about 4,000 people, La Loche has no sit-down restaurants, no banks, no movie theaters, not even a coffee shop. The nearest Tim Hortons restaurant, a Canadian staple, is about 60 miles away. ~
"La Loche, the Canadian Town Where 4 Were Killed, Has a Bleak History," New York Times

Other Indian, Native, and First Nations shootings

The Red Lake shootings (see #8 here) involved two incidents on March 21, 2005 that occurred in two places on the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota. Jeffrey James Weise was born to an unmarried Ojibwe couple from the Red Lake Indian Reservation in Red Lake, Minnesota. Weise killed his his grandfather and his grandfather's companion before going to the reservation high school, where he murdered seven more people and wounded five others. He then died by suicide.

A school shooting took place at Marysville-Pilchuck High School (MPHS) - 30 miles north of Seattle - on October 24, 2014. Four students were killed, and the shooter, another student, died by suicide. Jaylen Fryberg, 15, the killer, was a member of the Tulalip Tribes.

Trollhättan Attack: Man in Darth Vader-Type Mask Kills Two

A masked man (in his 20s) with a sword has attacked the Kronan school cafe in Trollhättan, Sweden. One teacher and one young male student are dead. Several students are injured, with at least two originally taken to the hospital. Health officials initially said the two seriously injured students were 11 and 15 years old, but apparently one of those two has died.  

The suspect, who is 21 and from Trollhättan, was shot and received medical attention. He later died at the hospital.

The media is reporting the attacker wore a Star Wars mask. USA Today noted: "the perpetrator was wearing a Darth Vader-like mask from Star Wars and that students initially thought it was a Halloween joke. The attacker even posed for pictures with two students before going on a rampage."

At some point during the rampage, he posed for a picture taken by a female pupil who thought the incident was a Halloween stunt, according to Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

The attacker was holding his weapon, which was covered in blood, but the pupil did not realize the blood was real, she said.

The weapon used was a katana. Historically, katana were one of the traditionally made Japanese swords (日本刀) that were used by the Samurai of feudal Japan.
Local police have confirmed that they are investigating reports that the suspect held far right beliefs.

Marty McFly: Silence, Earthling. My name is Darth Vader. I am an extraterrestrial from the planet Vulcan! ~ Back to the Future (1985), in which the time travel date of significance is October 21, 2015.

School attacks are rare in Sweden. This is the first since a shooting at a school in Kungalv near Gothenburg in 1961, which killed one person and injured six others.

"Columbine Goes International: After Littleton, the copycat effect involving school shootings went global." ~ The Copycat Effect, 2004.

Photo credit: EPA.

Kronan is Swedish for "king's crown," and the school uses a stylized crown as their symbol.

Troll sign credit

The name Trollhättan is translated as "troll's bonnet." The latter part "hätta" could also mean mountain top.

Trolls are generally associated, during our modern era, with Internet mischief makers and small beings. But traditionally, in Scandinava, trolls are ogres who are said to be man-sized to gigantic.

"Some traditions of 'wild men' tell of man-like beings that exceeded human beings in height, but at their greatest heights were not more than around 7 feet tall. We would identify them as Trolls and possible descendants of Neandertals. Descendants of both those distinctive and hairy near-men are known to have survived into recent times." ~ True Giants (Anomalist Books, 2010).

Thor's Stone: Thurston School Shootings' Name Game

Thurston means "Thor's Stone." It is a name involved in school violence incidents since, at least, 1998. Today gives us another example.

2015 Incident

Emergency dispatchers confirmed reports of an active shooter, a 15- or 16-year-old boy, was armed with a handgun, on campus about 7:40 a.m., on Monday, April 27, 2015. In the Year of the Ram, school violence visited another Thurston.

A gunman at North Thurston High School, 600 Sleater Kinney Road NE, Lacey, Washington State, near Seattle, fired, at least, two shots in a common area, and then was tackled by staff members, according to the school district. No one was hurt.
The school is in lockdown. Lacey police said the gunman is in custody.

A parent shows the text message she got from her child at North Thurston High School in Lacey, Wash., April 27, 2015. (Photo: KING 5 News)

North Thurston High School, located in the North Thurston Public Schools District in Lacey, Washington, is a comprehensive high school, which first opened in 1955. North Thurston serves a portion of Lacey and northeast Thurston County. The school is accredited by the Washington State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The principal is Tyler Roach.

This school has been a focus of concern in the past. According to the October 24, 2006, issue of the Mason County Daily News, a North Thurston School District teacher from Shelton, Washinton, was accused of bringing a gun onto school grounds and had to resign. The North Thurston School Board accepted the resignation of Mary Catherine Roe, a language arts teacher at Nisqually Middle School.

North Thurston High School is not to be confused with the Thurston High School shooting of Springfield, Oregon.

It will be recalled that on May 21, 1998, Kip Kinkel brought school violence to his fellow students at Thurston High School.

On that day, in Springfield, Oregon, two students were killed, and 22 others were wounded in the cafeteria at Thurston High School by 15-year-old Kipland "Kip" Kinkel. His parents were later found dead at home. Kinkel had brought three weapons to the high school, a .22 caliber rifle, a .22 caliber handgun, and a 9mm Glock semi-automatic pistol. 

Kinkel was convicted of shooting his parents, William, 59, and Faith, 57, in their Springfield home and, the next day, opening fire in the Thurston High School cafeteria, wounding 25 students and killing Mikael Nickolauson*, 17, and Ben Walker, 16.

Kinkel was sentenced to 112 years in prison in the Thurston shootings. His case was a precusor to the Columbine High School massacre of April 20, 1999.
My further investigations revealed that two other school shootings happened on that date in 1998.

From my book, The Copycat Effect, following my discussion of the Springfield, Oregon shooting, I wrote:

On the same day, May 21, 1998, 200 miles due north, at the end of the school day, Miles Fox, 15, a student of Onalaska High School, Onalaska, Washington, took a young woman hostage from his bus to his home, and died by suicide from a shot to his head. As the story aired on radio and television, Ricardo Martin, 15, shot himself with a .38 caliber pistol and died on the campus of Rialto High School, in Rialto, California.

The events happening earlier on May 21, in Springfield, Oregon, had been all over the radio, Internet, and news channels constantly, all day.

Thurston has had ripple effects through other school violence.

The Gresham, Oregon, Tuesday, April 10, 2011, school shooting was triggered by the shooter's viewing of the recent National Geographic Channel's The Final Report: Columbine.

The shooter Chad Antonio Escobedo had watched the Columbine documentary and decided April 7 that he would do a shooting at his school because he was angry. The incident took place at Springwater Trail High School in a Portland suburb. Coincidentally, the principal at Springwater — Larry Bentz — was principal at Thurston High School in Springfield, when the Kip Kinkel shooting occurred in 1998.

Thurston Name Game

The Thurston name game is strong in these school violence events. Thurston is an English-language surname. It appears to have originated from the Old Norse personal name Þórsteinn. This name is derived from the Old Norse elements Þórr ("Thor," the Scandinavian thunder god) and steinn ("stone," "rock").

As an aside, the name game kicks into high gear in a historical baseball-Hawaiian sidetrip, for Mr. Baseball writes:

Alexander Cartwright died on July 12, 1892, from blood poisoning from a boil on his neck. The Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown six months later on January 17, 1893. A group of Americans in Honolulu formed to request of President Benjamin Harrison that Hawaii be annexed to the United States. The president was in favor. The individual leading the cause for annexation was Lorrin Thurston. Coincidentally, Thurston had played baseball at Punahou School at the same time as Alexander III and Bruce Cartwright Sr.

Thurston, as a surname, is tied to powerful political and historical individuals in Hawaii, Oregon, Washington State, and elsewhere.

Howard Thurston (July 20, 1869 – April 13, 1936) was a stage magician from Columbus, Ohio, United States. He was the most famous magician of his time, and his traveling magic show was the biggest one of all; it was so large that it needed eight train cars to transport his road show.

In fiction, the character Francis Wayland Thurston was the narrator of The Call of Cthulhu.

Thor's Stone/Thurston

Thurstaston Hill is the location of Thor's Stone (shown), a large sandstone outcrop and a place of romantic legend. In the 19th century it was supposed that early Viking settlers may have held religious ceremonies here. A visit to the site by members of the British Archaeological Association in 1888 heard an account by Rev. A. E. P. Gray, rector of Wallasey, that the "Thor Stone" was also known in the locality as "Fair Maiden's Hall" and that children were "in the habit of coming once a year to dance around the stone". This part of Wirral was certainly part of a Norse colony centred on Thingwall in the 10th and 11th centuries. However, geologists and historians now think that the rock is a natural formation similar to a tor, arising from periglacial weathering of the sandstone, which was later exploited by quarrymen in the 18th and 19th centuries. Source.

As far as locations, several sites are named Thurston, and linked to people of that name:

Antarctica
Thurston Glacier, Marie Byrd Land, Antarctica

(Named by Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names for Thomas R. Thurston, United States Antarctic Research Program meteorologist at Byrd Station in 1965.)
Thurston Island, off Ellsworth Land, Antarctica

(The island was discovered from the air by Rear Admiral Byrd on February 27, 1940, who named it for W. Harris Thurston, New York textile manufacturer, designer of the windproof "Byrd Cloth" and sponsor of Antarctic expeditions.)

United Kingdom
Thurston, Suffolk, England, a village

(Allegedly, a local name meaning "settlement.")

United States
Thurston County, Nebraska
Thurston, Nebraska, a village

(The county and village were named after the United States Senator John M. Thurston.)
Thurston, New York, a town

(The town is named after early landowner William Thurston.)
Thurston, Ohio, a village
Thurston, Oregon, several places

(The settlement was named for pioneer George H. Thurston, and Thurston post office was established in 1877.)

Thurston, Virginia, an unincorporated community
Thurston County, Washington

(It is named after Samuel R. Thurston, the Oregon Territory's first delegate to Congress.)

April 27

April 27, 1911: Manhattan, Kansas, During a school play rehearsal, a revolver was accidentally loaded by a boy who tried to shoot a bird with it the day before. When the girl was to use the firearm as written in the script, she picked it up, then laid it down saying she was afraid of the old thing. The Teacher, Miss Reedy then grabbed the gun and said there was no need for alarm and pointed it at the girl, Pearl Reedy, 18 years old, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet lodged near her heart fatally wounding her.

April 27, 1936: Lincoln, Nebraska, Prof. John Weller shot and wounded Prof. Harry Kurz in a corridor of the University of Nebraska, apparently because of his impending dismissal at the end of the semester. After shooting Kurz Weller tried to escape, but was surrounded by police on the campus, whereupon he killed himself with a shot in the chest.

April 27, 1966: Bay Shore, New York, Teacher John S. Lane, 48, was shot and fatally wounded when he tried to stop 16-year-old student James Arthur Frampton, who was walking through the halls of Bay Shore Senior High School with a shotgun, searching for some boys with whom he had an argument earlier that day. Lane died of his wounds on June 13, 1966.

The Future

With the fatal crossbow incident in Spain on the Columbine anniversary, a school violence threat in Columbia, South Columbia, also on April 20th, and now this event, should we watch out during May 2015, for other school incidents?

Past school violence events have shown that the suicidal-homicidal rampage-styled shooters often focus on in-school cafeterias, for example, at Aarhus University, Denmark (1994), Thurston High School, Oregon (1998), Montreal, Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal (1998), Columbine High School, Colorado (1999), Red Lion Area Junior High School, Pennsylvania (2003), and Dawson College, Montreal (2006).

__________

*In terms of the name game, Bill Grimstad has been alerting his correspondents to an especially active "power name" in recent years: Nicholas. Please see the scholarly discussion of this name, here.

Columbine Copycats Continue: Teacher's Crossbow Death in Barcelona

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then Columbine happened on April 20, 1999.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Gateway Arch to the Khyber Pass Gateway

The Gateway to the Khyber Pass, at Peshawar, is an archway to a mountain pass linking Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Pass was an integral part of the ancient Silk Road and throughout history, it has been an important trade route between Central Asia and South Asia and a strategic military location. It also lies at the end of the Grand Trunk Road.

The heart of Khyber Pakhtonkhwa was initially termed “Pushpapura” and means "the city of flora." Peshawar is sited on the boundary of South Asia and Central Asia and become the business center of South Asia. Peshawar is also known as “The City of Frontier” because the city that link the Afghanistan and Pakistan through the Khyber Pass. Peshawar is the commercial center of the Pakistan based, in part, on their connection to its unique food industry and home of textile, silk, carpets and other items.

From the Gateway Arch to the Khyber Pass Gateway, the thread of destruction of human life continues. We living in times of violence.

The Taliban stormed a military-run school in northwest Pakistan, gunning down and killing at least 141 people -- most of them children -- in one of the bloodiest attacks in the country's history.

The Army Public School is located at Warsak Road near Cantonment, Peshawar, which is part of Army Public Schools & Colleges System that runs 146 schools in Pakistan.

The attack began at around noon when seven gunmen, dressed in uniforms of the Pakistani Frontier Corps, entered the school from the back through a cemetery adjacent to the school, after scaling its walls. Before entering the school the gunmen set fire to vehicles, then indiscriminately opened fire with automatic weapons in the central auditorium of the school, where children were gathered for a school function.

The Pakistani Taliban killed 141 people, including 132 children, in an attack on an army run school in Peshawar, a city in the country’s north-west. The attack was the deadliest in Pakistan’s history.

All of the militants in the school attack in northwest Pakistan have been killed, a Peshawar police official says.

Pakistan’s Major General Asim Bajwa says there were seven militants, all wearing suicide jackets, and that several special forces soldiers were wounded in the fighting.

“The terrorists used a ladder to cross the school walls from the graveyard behind the school. The terrorists and the Pakistani army fought in the administrative block of the school.”

He says 960 students and staff were saved in the rescue operation, and that 121 children were wounded during the attack.

This is a short overview of similar attacks in Pakistan.

16 December 2014: Taliban attack on school in Peshawar leaves at least 135 people dead, most of them children

22 September 2013: Militants linked to the Taliban kill at least 80 people at a church in Peshawar, in one of the worst attacks on Christians

10 January 2013: Militant bombers target the Hazara Shia Muslim minority in the city of Quetta, killing 120 at a snooker hall and on a street

28 May 2010: Gunmen attack two mosques of the minority Ahmadi Islamic sect in Lahore, killing more than 80 people

18 October 2007: Twin bomb attack at a rally for Benazir Bhutto in Karachi leaves at least 130 dead. Unclear if Taliban behind attack.

Peshawar is situated in a large valley near the eastern end of the Khyber

Pass.

In 2002, Osama bin Laden slipped into Pakistan. He then lived in at least

five different places including Peshawar before finally settling down in

Abbottabad in 2005. It was there where he was eventually killed by US Navy

SEALs in a covert raid begun on May 1, 2011. The official death date for

Osama bin Laden is given as May 2, 2011.

The operation, code named Zero Dark Thirty, and used as the title of a

famed film on the event, was defined as "a military term for 30 minutes

after midnight, and it refers also to the darkness and secrecy that

cloaked the entire decade-long mission."

The raid was completed shortly after 1am local time when he was shot once

in the chest and once in the head by a Navy Seal who announced, "For God

and country Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo," because Geronimo was the

code-name given to the al-Qaeda leader.

Fatality in Multiple Stabbings at School

UPDATE: Was the stabbings in Texas due to a gang-related fight between Hispanics and AfricanAmericans? Three suspects in custody appear to be Latinos. One dead victim has been identified as 16 year old AfricanAmerican student Joshua Broussard.


Harris County (Texas) Sheriff's Office said one person is dead after a stabbing in cafeteria at a Spring ISD high school. The incident happened at the high school on Cypresswood at North Freeway. Multiple people were stabbed, with at least one death and three injured.

It happened around 7 a.m. Wednesday, September 4, 2013, at Spring High School, in Spring, Texas.

Authorities have not released any other information about the names or continuing condition of the victim who was killed, those injured, or the suspect.

Life Flight airlifted a 16-year-old boy to Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center. Officials have not said how many others were injured.

Spring High School, off Interstate 45, is a public high school located in the Spring CDP in unincorporated Harris County, Texas, United States. Spring High School, which serves grades 9 through 12, is a part of the Spring Independent School District. The school is north of Houston.

Further details will be added as they come in.

Update: Suspect Identified ~ Santa Monica College Shootings

Santa Monica College's gunman has been identified as 23-year-old John Zawahri, a former student at the college. Police said he had prepared with an arsenal of weapons and ammunition.

This is his high school photo. Source.

Zawahri enters Santa Monica College.

The shooting suspect first killed his father and brother before moving on to engage in random shootings on his way to Santa Monica College's library to have his own life ended in a "suicide by cop" exchange.

President Obama was three miles away when a shooting began at Santa Monica Community College, west of Los Angeles, on Friday, June 7, 2013. (Above, President Obama is shown arriving in California earlier.)

A man dressed in black walked onto the Santa Monica College campus, dressed all in black and paramilitary, with an assault weapon. Several shots were fired at women, at passing cars, and at a bus near campus. Reportedly two people were killed, also near campus, in a house that was set on fire.

The suspect was killed.

Santa Monica Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks said the shooter was killed on the campus of Santa Monica College after attempting to evade police responding to multiple shootings that began about a mile from the school. Seabrooks said that two people were dead in a home in Yorkshire Avenue that was ablaze about a mile from campus. Another person died on Cloverfield Boulevard, and two were killed on 19th and Pearl streets. Another woman later died in the hospital, Seabrooks said.

The dead body of the suspect, who looked like he was a SWAT member, was seen by several eyewitnesses in the campus library.

At midnight, on Friday, police revised the number of people killed in the shooting rampage in Santa Monica, California, to four deaths plus one dead gunman.  All the victims were from shots of a lone gunman. The next day, another victim died. Five dead, plus the gunman. Six dead, in total.

The gunman died on the campus of Santa Monica College after being shot by police.

Sgt. Richard Lewis of the Santa Monica Police Department added that five people were injured, one is in critical condition and one is in serious but stable condition.

One witness to the shooting who was not identified told a local CNN affiliate that he saw a man drive up in a car, walk into the middle of an intersection with a gun and open fire at passing vehicles and a building before "he jumped back in the car and took off."

"It seemed like he was alone in his car," the witness said, recounting that he took cover under the dashboard of his own car, which was struck by gunfire. "I saw him jumping out of the car. He had a big, black gun in his hand and he just started blasting maybe 10 rounds from the left to the right."

Obama was attending a fundraising event at the Santa Monica home of former News Corp President Peter Chernin at about the time of the shooting and had just finished his remarks, but he made no mention of the incident.

A Secret Service spokesman in Washington said: "We are aware of the incident and it is not impacting the visit. It's a local police matter at this point."

Santa Monica College also had a gunfire incident on that campus on August 16, 2011.

Lone Star Shooting: Wall-to-Wall Media Attention

Wall-to-wall media went wild today with the reports out of Texas of a "college shooting."

Did they go overboard?

I remain convinced my hypothesis in The Copycat Effect is a valid factor, among many, in linking this kind of media attention to fostering an environment of future shootings.

This shooting, for example, does not appear to have been a random, senseless mass shooting. This was a confrontation between two individuals who apparently got into a verbal disagreement where guns were drawn. Two people started shooting, two bystanders (one white, one black) in a hallway got wounded, and one other person collapsed with an apparent heart attack. This is not to diminish it, but the processes of these kinds of school shootings are much different than homicidal-suicidal forms of school violence.

One federal official said the Texas incident was a "gang-related" shooting (read, "African-American" in this location*) versus a random school mass-shooting (read, "Caucasian"). That hints at more than the media wanted to look at, for the comparisons to Newtown, the debate on gun control, and the horror of the incident were reinforced often today.
Police descended on the campus. Lots of law enforcers. People and police are supersensitive from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The media flew overhead, on many flybys.

In North Harris, Texas, two "people of interest" (AfricanAmericans, one with a red shirt) were seen by news helicopters as having apparently already been arrested (in handcuffs).

Now the television cable news channels are interviewing students who were only marginally involved, but most are naming all their friends with whom they ran from the area. And seem to be "enjoying" the media attention.

Aerial footage from local television stations showed police cars and ambulances parked on the Lone Star College System campus about 20 miles north of downtown Houston. Emergency personnel could be seen tending to people on stretchers, while others ran from a building led by officers.
Mark Smith, spokesman for the Harris County Emergency Corps, said four people were taken to two hospitals. He said at least two had gunshot wounds, and one appeared to have had a heart attack related to the shooting. He said one was in critical condition. Source.

At least three people were shot in a shooting at Lone Star College in north Houston, Texas some time before 12:30 PM. Witnesses on the scene say the shooting may have escalated after a heated argument, possibly over a bad grade. At least two victims were caught in the crossfire and suffered “multiple gun shot wounds,” KTRK reports, and are in serious condition. They were brought into surgery at Ben Taub General Hospital. One of the victims — who was shot in the leg — is a school employee. The other, a younger student, was found on the ground unconscious, with his eyes closed. Another person on the scene suffered a heart attack. Source.

*Gang-related: In 1996, 50 percent of gang members were juveniles (i.e., younger than 18) and 50 percent were adults (i.e., 18 and older). In 1999, these numbers were 37 percent and 63 percent, respectively. In 1999, respondents reported that 47 percent of gang members were Hispanic, 31 percent African American, 13 percent white, 7 percent Asian, and 2 percent "other" (National Youth Gang Survey Trends From 1996 to 2000, 2002).