Halloween Recap 2014: Twins, 777, and The Death of the Innocents

They couldn't afford costumes, so 13-year-old Lexandra Perez wore only face paint and her twin sister Lexi wore regular clothes when they dashed out the front door of the Fairhaven Apartments on Halloween. They carried orange plastic pumpkins. LA Times.

Santa Ana (named for Saint Anne, "holy grace," the mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus)

Twin sisters Lexandra and Lexi Perez, 13, along with their friend, Andrea Gonzalez also 13, were killed on Halloween night by a hit-and-run driver. They were trick-or-treating in Santa Ana, Orange County, California.  The three girls had on black leggings and dark clothing. They were struck by a sports utility vehicle while in the crosswalk on Fairhaven Street on Friday evening in Santa Ana, about 35 miles (55 km) south of Los Angeles.

Perez means "son of Pero, Pedro, Peter," Portuguese, Galician and Spanish forms of the name Peter, which derives, via Latin "petra," from the Greek word "η πετρα" meaning "stone, rock."

Gonzalez means "son of Gonzalo," with Gonzalo from gundis ("war") combined with salve/salvo. Also, from Visigoth origins, it means "son of battle genius" or "son of war elf."

Neighbors said the 13-year-old Perez twins always walked together. Lourdes Castrejon, 46, who knew them for years, said they were sweet and well-mannered, always saying "good day" in English and Spanish. "I saw them grow up," she said. "They looked just like the Virgin of Guadalupe." LA Times.

On Sunday, police made multiple arrests in connection with the hit-and-run killing of the girls. Police launched a search for the occupants of the vehicle, a Honda CR-V, which sped away from the scene. The SUV was later found abandoned at a nearby strip mall with damage to its front end, Santa Ana police said. Sources: 1, 2.

The Perez's Memorial Fund is located here.

UPDATE:

The Bell name game again. As Enki passes along, a suspect has been arrested in the killings of these three 13-year-olds.

Jaquinn Ramone Bell, 31, is seen in an undated picture released by the Santa Ana Police Department in Santa Ana, California November 3, 2014. Santa Ana Police Department Handout

Irvine (Scottish: "fresh water," English: "wild boar" + "friend")

Some 10 miles away from Santa Ana, in Irvine, on West Yale Loop near Burwood Street, about 30 minutes after the girls were hit, John Alcorn, 65, (an attorney at Wilner and O'Reilly) was trick-or-treating with his 4-year-old son (who was wearing a Captain America costume). The calm, leafy Woodbridge neighborhood has been plagued by speeding cars in recent years. A Mazda struck them. Alcorn was killed; his son was rushed to a trauma center, where he was in critical condition. Alcorn derives from the Scottish/Old English Alchorn, a personal name + literally "horn," but used in a transferred sense to describe a projecting spur of a hill; hence "Alca's hill." Alchorne, begat, Alhorne, Alhorn, Aldcorn, Alcorn. Source.

John R. Alcorn

Vancouver (Dutch: "the place where cows ford the river")

Also on Halloween, authorities in Vancouver, Washington, said two 7-year-old girls and a 20-year-old woman sustained life-threatening injuries when they were hit by a car while trick-or-treating in Vancouver. It occurred at Northeast 112th Avenue near Northeast 39th Street. There are two adult victims, a 30-year-old female, Chelina Alsten, and a 32-year-old female, Annie Arnold, and two juvenile victims, a 7-year-old girl Cadence Boyer, and another girl. The 32-year-old woman is the mother of the 7-year-old, and the other two victims are friends of the family and are not related. Cadence Boyer is in a coma.

"Cadence was their little princess. She was born on 07/07/07. She's 7-years-old. She's most likely not going to see 8," family friend Sean McNamee said. "She was the light of their life." Source.

The fund for the Boyers can be found here.

There is a wealth of information on the significance of the number 777. See here. And you are wondering why I'm watching out for November 7th?

Greece (named after Graecus, the son of the god Zeus and Pandora II, whose maternal grandmother was Pandora of the famed pithos/storage jar, which was mistranslated into "box")

At Greece, New York, a three-year-old boy dressed as Spiderman was killed and a 16-year-old girl was seriously injured Halloween night when they were hit by a minivan as they began trick-or-treating. The car struck the children as they crossing two-lane Latta Road in Greece about 9:40 p.m., police said. Police say Tayvier Granderson died shortly after being hit. The teenager, Nicole Moore, was taken to a hospital with serious injuries. They said the driver is cooperating in the investigation and has not been charged. Source.

Click here for funeral fund for Tayvier Granderson.

In Lake Wales, Polk County, Florida, Dohntae Vasquez, 2, was killed when trick-or-treating with his grandmother and a family friend, David Heidler and his two kids. Dohntae was in a stroller with two other children when Heidler, who was pushing them across a street realized he had dropped his cell phone. The man stopped the stroller in the median and told the children to stay while he retrieved the phone. Dohntae got out of the stroller, darted across U.S. 27 to his grandmother on the curb, and was hit by a citrus worker bus. (Vasquez appears to be from seventh-century Basque "bela," meaning crow, and the diminutive suffix "sko," suggesting someone fierce. Vasquez = savage, brutal crow, blackbird.) Source. 

Click here for the burial fund for Dohntae.

Portland ("land near port")

Portland, Cumberland County, Maine, awoke the day after October 31, 2014, to news that a house, which was full of young people from a Halloween party, had caught on fire. The blaze broke out shortly after 7 a.m. Saturday in the apartment house. There were six tenants at 20 Noyes Street, and all five who died lived there, authorities said. It is located near other apartments full of University of Southern Maine students, but it turned out now of the victims were current students.

The last body was not found until Saturday afternoon.

Three of the five have been identified: Nikki Finlay, Ashley Thomas and David Bragdon Jr.

Also, please consider the Brian's Departure Fund, click here.

Condolences to all.

In the realm of "I thought it was a Halloween prank" or some such, we have these 2014 stories:

Zombie run over by Zombie Slayer Bus

Hauser, Idaho. October 10, 2014.

A night of scary fun at an Halloween attraction turned deadly Friday when a teenage employee playing a zombie died in an accident. The 18-year-old employee of the Incredible Corn Maze in Hauser, Idaho, was run over by a bus ferrying paintball-gunning customers, officials say.
The corn maze’s customers paid to shoot employees dressed as zombies on the “Zombie Slayer Bus Ride.”

Jeremy T. McSpadden Jr. of Spokane Valley, Washington, was dressed as a zombie as he ran toward the bus and fell.
He was run over by the rear passenger wheel and likely died “instantly,” officials said. The cornfield’s uneven terrain caused the bus to rock and shake so no one immediately noticed McSpadden had died.
“Many of the patrons believed it was just part of the ride,” the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office said. Read more here.

Halloween Haunted Hayride Kills One
Mechanic Falls, Maine, October 11, 2014 

A Halloween-themed hayride loaded with riders crashed down a hill in the Maine woods and slammed into a tree, fatally injuring a teenage girl [Cassidy Charette, 17, of Oakland, Maine] and leaving more than 20 other people hurt....The accident occurred during the Gauntlet Haunted Night Ride at Harvest Hill Farm in Mechanic Falls, Maine, about 25 miles southwest of Augusta. The farm, which also features the popular daytime attraction Pumpkin Land, remains closed while police investigate. More.

Beheading Thought To Be Halloween Prank

Farmingdale, New York, October 28, 2014.

Police said Derek Ward, 35, killed his 66-year-old mother Patricia Ward in their Long Island, New York, apartment before walking into the path of an oncoming commuter train. Neighbors witnessed the horrific scene as Ward reportedly dragged his mother's decapitated body into the street on Tuesday night in Farmingdale, about 35 miles east of New York City. Witnesses told local media that they initially thought it was a macabre Halloween prank. More.

Up next, November 7th...

Post-Aurora Lexilinking

By the pricking of my thumbs, 

Something wicked this way comes. 

~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth.

You know what I've noticed? Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan." But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy. Upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I'm an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It's fair!

~ The Joker, in The Dark Knight (2008), written by Jonathan Nolan & Christopher Nolan, story by Christopher Nolan & David S. Goyer, characters created by Bob Kane.

There are many ways to read the Joker's statement.

It is with some simplicity that academic thoughts may consider this summer's mass shootings as distractions from facing deeper societial issues. Harvard student Heather L. Pickerell did write, recently, comparing the 52 wounded and 12 killed in Aurora on July 20th with Iraqi causalities: "Did you know that 82 people were killed and 180 wounded by car bombs in Iraq on the same day as the shootings?"

While tragic and unfortunate, of course, she misses part of the bigger picture herself.

Wars, warzone deaths, systematic civil war causalities, and inner city gang shootings have become background noise in a culture that does experience violence closer to home in raw moments of stark realities. But in a broader context, before the latest homegrown wave of shootings dies down (sincerely, no pun intended), many other people will die, many others will be scarred, emotionally and physically, for life. Mass violence deaths, whether in Aurora, Columbine, and VA Tech, or in lesser remembered locations like Oak Creek, Bailey, and Nickel Mines, are as real, week to week, as the deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

Believe it or not, the major difference is that the human psyche appears to consider it more understandable, even more rational, to conceptualize the loss of lives in national, regional, and turf wars. It is less within our frames of reference to figure out what is happening within the landscape of the human mind that leads to mass shootings. But both are equally awful.

Part of the rationale for a deeper examination of the copycat effect, an investigation of the behavior contagion among mass killers and spree shooters, has been to find a key to opening that door or window to the comprehension of things like the summer of shootings we have just experienced.

Often, it requires thinking outside the box. Therefore, one avenue of pursuit I have traveled down is seriously noting if lexilinking could be a factor. Let me explain.

First, what is "lexilinking" (for those of you who have never heard the word before)?

Several writers, like myself, began using "lexi-links" or "lexilinks" within articles we wrote for Fortean Times and other publications in the 1970s. 

Bob Rickard reminded me that "lexilink" was coined by Anthony J. Bell in his article, "Lexi-Links: Nature's Play on Words" in Fortean Times 17 (August 1976), pages 5-7.

Bell specifically looked at a new concept, lexilinks, and defined them this way:

Bell examined the "frequency of certain words" to attempt to decode what might be happening. He found that the "phenomenon of link-words" in articles and books is often "mirrored by link-words of events in the physical world." These incidents were, he surmised, related to "various violent events and no doubt have some sort of sociological significance," as he penned in that initial 1976 contribution.

Anthony J. Bell, who penned his letters with a northern English cadence, turned out to be a mysterious figure himself, with a mysterious name (see Bell). He ended up quietly appearing in Fortean Times twice after that. Bell wrote only one other article which developed the theme of puns and lexilinks in "Precession of the Gracious - Fallout of the Damned," in Fortean Times 20 (February 1977), on pages 14-17. He also sent in a brief letter on crop circles, which appeared in Fortean Times 58 (July 1991), in which he accurately predicted that crop circles would increase in complexity from their early simple designs.

Editor Bob Rickard wrote me in September 2012 that after the 1991 letter, at Fortean Times, "We never heard from him again."

Lexilink, as a word, has not actually entered any formal dictionaries. Wikipedia, indirectly, has apparently (in the past?) defined it vaguely this way: "A lexilink is a lexical link. This can be based on etymology, translations from other languages, and Anglicizations and other similar transformations."

Venturing into making some debunking comments related to "lexilinks," we then find this: "Lexilinks can be ascribed to coincidence, hoaxes, and some kind of conspiracy."

Not exactly a well-formed definition, it has vanished from the formal Wikipedia site, but the attempt lives on at Academic Kids.

Lexilinks are used in the twilight language analysis of events, frequently. Let's look at the Summer of the Gun's lexilinks, discovered in conjunction with the Aurora and post-Aurora world of 2012. Finding them brings up the usual questions. 

Are the coincidences found in the lexilinking being mined after Colorado's Aurora red dawn event, in some inexplicable way, part of the copycat effect? In other words, do what we are discovering synchromystically, as "coincidences" and "synchronicities," are variables in these cases that serve as cosmic triggers or programmed stimuli to the individuals involved? Do the shooters suddenly sense they are engaged in some form of theater reinforced by the lexilinking they find themselves in the midst of? Do the "coincidential" lexilinks act as risk factors pushing them over the edge?

The lexilinks found in the Aurora case and the shootings and related incidents that followed have been rather mind-blowing. The visual copycat effect experienced through repeating imagery of colorfully-haired Jokers and body-armored Banes is easier to understand. But the appearance of names in the stories, one linked to the other, is more difficult for the human brain to compute.

Take, for example, the visual linking that may have been overlooked, even though I mentioned it briefly before. The first verbal and written reports of the shooter - before any photographs were published of James Eagan Holmes - told of the Aurora killer having a goatee (even though this apparently did not turn out to be true, we are told). For example, moviegoer Corbin Dates, 23, who was sitting in the second row for the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, told television news reporters of a man sporting a goatee who, before the film started, answered a cell phone call, then got up and propped open an emergency exit door.

Guess what "look" appeared over and over in the first wave of Aurora copycats? Yes, most of these copycats had scruffy beards and goatees:

 

Let's look, therefore, beyond the visual, at a few of the specific word lexilinks that have popped up related to the Aurora events. (BTW, this rendering is not comprehensive, but it shows some highlights. Please pass along more, via comments, below.)

During the spring of 2012, the area around Denver, Colorado was swept by wildfires.

The political news was filled with presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Bain (= bones, death, white) Capital involvements.

Excitement was building on the horizon for the release of The Dark Knight Rises: A Fire Will Rise, a film by Christopher Nolan starring Christian Bale as Batman/Bruce Wayne and Tom Hardy as the super-villian Bane (= bones, death, white).

At the July 20, 2012, midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Century 16's Theater 9, a man dressed in a gas mask, body armor, and with automatic weapons - dressed as Bane - opened fire on the movie audience in Colorado (= red), in Aurora (= dawn). The suspect then takes off his Bane costume to reveal himself to have orange hair, and declared himself, "I am the Joker."

The suspect was arrested. His name is James Eagan (= fiery) Holmes. He killed 12, and wounded 52 others.

Several copycat incidents occurred, some reflecting the Aurora incident, alluded to being Jokers or Banes.

For example, one of them on July 31, 2012, resulted the arrest of Thomas Michael Casper for a report of loud music ended up taking Casper making repeated references to "the Joker" and the Colorado theater shooting, telling police he understood the shooter's motives and would embark on his own rampage. The lexilink that became quite obvious was that this incident occurred in Eagan, Minnesota, a town with the same middle name as James Eagan Holmes, the Aurora suspect.

The Sikh Temple shooting took place on August 4, 2012, at Oak Creek, Wisconsin, resulting in seven dead, including the shooter Wade Michael Page (who lived on Holmes Avenue in nearby Cuhady, Wisconsin) and use to live in Littleton, Colorado (location of Columbine). Page, it has been pointed out, is the squire of a knight, and Wade Michael Page, as a neo-Nazi envisioned himself a Dark Knight. On July 20, 2012, a misidentification occurred when another James Holmes living in Littleton, Colorado had his Facebook page flooded with comments.

On the night of September 4, 2012, a gunman shot and killed one person during the Parti Québécois victory rally in Montreal, Quebe, Canada. Guards whisked PQ leader Pauline Marois off the stage as handlers informed the partisan crowd there had been gunfire and an arson fire had been set in the back of the Metropolis concert venue.

The suspect arrested was named Richard Henry Bain, and he owned Les Activités Rick Activities, a fishing camp on Lake Wade in La Conception, near the resort of Mont-Tremblant.

Richard Henry Bain, above, and Bane, the villian, below.

On September 5, 2012, police arrested a man wearing "Joker" makeup at a Florida movie theater after someone reported the man acting suspiciously, the Melbourne Police Department said. When police arrived at the Premiere Theatre, they found 21-year-old Christopher Alex Sides with his face painted like the Joker from the Batman movies and his hair dyed pink (or orange in some lighting). What was soon discovered was his intriguing address.

CHRISTOPHER ALEX SIDES W/M DOB: 05/07/91 ARREST DATE: 09/05/12 ARRESTING AGENCY: BCSO FAILURE TO APPEAR (Booking Photograph)

An earlier arrest is part of the recent public record: "Christopher Alex Sides, 19, of 1802 Aurora Park Circle, Melbourne, was charged April 17 with felony violation of conditional pre-trial release." "Police Report - Melbourne, Brevard County Sheriff's Office," Hometown News, April 29, 2011.

That's right. Sides lived in a trailer at the Aurora Park.

Enough for now. The lexilinks abound.

Oh yes, be alert next summer.

The new Superman film, Man of Steel, is due to be released on June 14, 2013 (Flag Day in the USA).

Oral tradition passed on through multiple generations holds that on June 14, 1908, Theodore Roosevelt was dining outside Philadelphia, when he noticed a man wiping his nose with what he thought was the American Flag. In outrage, Roosevelt picked up a small wooden rod and began to whip the man for "defacing the symbol of America." After about five or six strong whacks, he noticed that the man was not wiping his nose with a flag, but with a blue handkerchief with white stars. Upon realization of this, he apologized to the man, but hit him once more for making him "riled up with national pride." Source.

Man of Steel covertly staged part of their film pre-production and production work from a trailer near the International House of Pancakes, the IHOP, in Aurora, Illinois (pictured), at Orchard Road and Interstate 88, on July 27, 2012.

The production company did some filming later in August 2012, in Illinois, in Plano (the same name of a town in Texas directly associated with waves of suicide clusters and suburban heroin overdoses).

Man of Steel is from Warner Brothers, as are the three The Dark Knight films. The fear of the Superman curse appears to be a cause for concern among a few Warner executives. The hex has haunted Superman films and television programs for decades.

The Dark Knight trilogy's Christopher Nolan produced and cowrote (with David S. Goyer) Man of Steel, which is the first part of an 8-hour long trilogy. The director is
Zack Snyder, whose films, Dawn of the Dead (2004), 300 (2007), Watchmen (2009), and Sucker Punch (2011), are well-known for their graphic-novel-like violence.

American trailer: Kevin Costner narrates.

   

International trailer: Russell Crowe narrates.