Cypress Stabbings

The attacker stabbed women. 


He is long-haired, white, deaf, an enrolled student, and carries around a stuffed animal toy, reportedly a monkey. His first name is said to be "Dylan." The suspect, Dylan Quick, 20, was later charged.

Multiple people were injured in a stabbing incident today at a Houston-area college, prompting officials to urge students to take shelter, the school said.

At least 14 people were injured in the incident at Lone Star College's CyFair campus in Cypress, Texas, according to CNN affiliates KHOU, KTRK and KPRC, Fox News, and other sources.

Authorities have detained one suspect, the school said in a statement.

"There are multiple injuries and conflicting reports on the total number of victims and severity of injuries," the school's statement said. "We an confirm that several people have been transported to area hospitals."

Four were serious, two critical. Two individuals refused treatment.

There is no motive known.

The timing is intriguing, considering the attempts to restriction gun purchases without background checks and limiting ammunition magazine volumes. Stabbings have traditionally been a problem in China.

I was just preparing to write that the annual heightened "danger zone" of school/college violence of late April, which occurs following an active fall, is almost upon us.

(Also, in a "name game" coincidence, on this very morning, on Twitter, I published an image I had just taken in southern Illinois of a cypress tree and its enigmatic knees, strangely blurry in the photo near a Bucky Fuller dome.)

Earlier on April 9, 2013: A 60-year-old veteran gunned down 13 people in Serbia, including a baby, in a pre-dawn house-to-house rampage today before trying to kill himself and his wife, in what RT is calling Serbia's "worst peacetime shooting." The man, identified as Ljubisa Bogdanovic, used a handgun in the shooting spree at five houses in Velika Ivanca, a village 30 miles southeast of Belgrade. Residents of the village said he first killed his son before leaving the house and then began shooting his neighbors, some of whom were still asleep.

"He knocked on the doors and as they were opened he just fired a shot," said one. Reuters reports that his mother was among the dead. The man and his wife were both severely injured by the shootings; officials say the motive is unclear. The suspect had lost his job last year and fought as a Serb volunteer soldier in the war in Croatia in 1992, the police chief said. Villagers said Bogdanovic fought in Vukovar, the eastern Croatian town that was destroyed in a massive Serbian-led army offensive, the scene of the worst bloodshed during Croatia's 1991-95 war for independence.

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).