April 19th Again: Nova Scotia's Mass Shooting

The high school photograph of Nova Scotia's mass shooter.

Is this another "incel" incident?

For several years I have written of this time of year as a "red zone of danger." I even mentioned the temporal syndrome associated with late April's infamous events in The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines.

During the morning of April 19, 2020, I tweeted a message about recalling today as a date with multiple anniversaries of note: the original Patriots Day of the Revolutionary War due to the battles at Concord and Lexington. The events of Waco and the Oklahoma City Bombing on this date.

I posted images of the Boym Design's two "Buildings of Disaster" for Waco and OKC's Murrah Building.

I have pointed to my extensive listing of violence and deaths tied to this last half of several Aprils in past blog postings, including "The Most Dangerous Time of Year," from 2018, and "The Red Zone of April: A Dangerous Time."

In that piece, I review these events for

April 19:

1775 – Battles of Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, the first battles of the American Revolutionary War. This is the actual anniversary of the battles, even though the observance has become a date tied to the third Monday in April.
1897 – First running of the Boston Marathon, with marathons named after the Greek Battle of Marathon.
1993 – The 51-day FBI siege of the Branch Davidian building outside Waco, Texas, USA, ends when a fire breaks out. Eighty-one people die.
1993 – South Dakota governor George Mickelson and seven others are killed when a state-owned aircraft crashes in Iowa.
1995 – Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, USA, is bombed, killing 168.
1995 – Richard Wayne Snell, a convicted murderer, member of the white supremacist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), is executed in Arkansas. Snell was involved in filming the planes that landed at the restricted airport in Mena, Arkansas, believed by many conspiracy theorists to be used in a CIA-sanctioned cover-up to smuggle drugs into America. Snell had been accused of plotting to bomb the Murrah Building in the 1980s. Snell reportedly watched televised reports of the Oklahoma City bombing on the day of his execution and nodded in approval.
2013 – Boston Marathon bombings suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev is killed in a shootout with police. His brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is captured while hiding in a boat inside a backyard in Watertown, Massachusetts.


April 20:

1889 – Adolf Hitler, Austrian-German soldier and politician, Chancellor of Germany (d. 1945) is born
1939 – Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday is celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany.
1945 – World War II: Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
1961 – Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.
1971 – According to Steven Hager, editor of High Times, he found the term 420 originated at San Rafael High School in 1971, among the Waldos. They would meet every day after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke marijuana at the Louis Pasteur statue. One of the Waldos notes, "We did discover we could talk about getting high in front of our parents without them knowing by using the phrase 420." By extension now, April 20 ("4/20" in U.S. dating shorthand) has evolved into a counterculture holiday, where people gather to celebrate and consume cannabis.
1978 – Korean Air Lines Flight 902 is shot down by the Soviet Union.
1999 – Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed 13 people and injured 21 others before dying by suicide at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado.
2007 – Johnson Space Center shooting: William Phillips with a handgun barricades himself in NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas before killing a male hostage and himself.
2015 – A substitute teacher was killed at the Joan Fuster School in the La Sager neighborhood of Barcelona, Spain, by a 13-year-old student with a crossbow and machete. Four other people were injured.


Now on April 19, 2020

Therefore, today, Sunday, April 19, 2020, we should not be surprised to learn that a mass shooting has occurred.

From Saturday through Sunday, for 12 hours, a gunman drove across the northern part of the province of Nova Scotia shooting people dead. Canadian police, as of Sunday night, said at least 16 people were dead, plus the gunman too. On Monday morning, during the COVID19 government news conference, the prime minister said a total of 19 people had died.

One of the dead was a police officer and another was injured. The dead officer has been identified as Heidi Stevenson, a mother of two and a 23-year-old veteran of the force.

The victims identified so far, besides RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson, a 23-year member of the national police force, and a mother of two, are Debert Elementary school teacher Lisa McCully; care assistant Kristen Beaton; and Heather O’Brien, a nurse from Truro. Additionally, two correctional officers and two neighbors of the gunman, were all killed in their homes.

Altogether, including the shooter, twenty-three (23) people died in the shooting.

The gunman was named as 51-year-old Gabriel Wortman, who died after shooting people in several locations across the province. He was described as white male, bald, 6'2" - 6'3" with green eyes.

The shooting reportedly began in the small Atlantic coastal town of Portapique, about 130km north (80 miles) of Halifax, the provincial capital. It ended Sunday, April 19, at a gas station in Enfield. Online records show Wortman ran a denture clinic in the city of Dartmouth, across the water from Halifax.

One local resident said she had come across two burning police vehicles while out driving on Sunday morning. One man said he saw at least three separate fires.

“There was one officer we could see on scene and then all of a sudden, he went running toward one of the burning vehicles,” Darcy Sack told the CBC.

“We heard gunshots,” she said, adding that one police officer looked to have been injured.Authorities said Wortman was driving what appeared to be a police car and was wearing a uniform but later reported he was at the wheel of a Chevrolet sports utility vehicle that had been modified to resemble a white RCMP vehicle – “one that he has basically made himself,” said Brian Sauvé, president of the National Police Federation. Police have said the suspect was not an employee or officer with the RCMP.

There was on difference between Wortman's car and the official RCMP vehicles: the car #. The suspect's car is 28B11, behind rear passenger window.

“In excess of 10 people have been killed,” RCMP Chief Superintendent Chris Leather said, before later revising the total to “at least 13.” “We believe it to be one person who is responsible for all the killings and that he alone moved across the northern part of the province and committed what appears to be several homicides.”

Please note, in high school, Wortman said his "future may include being an RCMP officer."

Name game: "Wortman" = a grower or seller of vegetables or of medicinal herbs and spices.

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RCMP's fallen Heidi Stevenson is to be remembered on Friday, April 24, 2020.

April 20, 2020

What will Monday, April 20th begat?

In 2015, Mother Jones mentioned the high number of "copycats" associated with Columbine. In The Copycat Effect, I tracked over 400 in the month after the April 20, 1999 Columbine shooting.

The cult of Hitler's birthday and Columbine travel forth into the future.

Bundy Ranch

In 2014, the moniker "Bundy" is linked to events reminding many of Ruby Ridge, Waco, and other similar situations. The Bundy Standoff (also known as the Bundy Ranch Standoff and the Siege of Bundy Ranch) is an ongoing standoff between the United States Bureau of Land Management and cattle farmer Cliven Bundy. The standoff originated when the BLM accused Bundy of herding cattle which threatened the desert tortoise.

Reports of black helicopters being used to herd Bundy cattle to be caught and killed by the BLM has further incited anger in the Old West, and raised fears of government conspiracy and mistreatment. The BLM has designated "First Amendment areas," deemed as the only place where protesters (in support of Bundy) are allowed to exercise their First Amendment rights.

April Flashbacks: Waco, OKBomb, Columbine, Hitler, Patriots Day, VA Tech...

It will be recalled that the Waco Siege (also known as the Waco Massacre) was a standoff and assault of a compound belonging to the religious group Branch Davidians by American federal and Texas state law enforcement and military between February 28 and April 19, 1993.

Four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians killed in initial raid. A 51-day siege ensued, ending with an FBI assault during which the compound burned down, killing 76 people, including many children, inside, including David Koresh. Eleven people who left the compound were arrested.

As a direct result of the events at Waco were cited as the primary motivation for the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing that took place exactly two years later in 1995.

Timothy McVeigh cited the Waco incident as a primary motivation for the Oklahoma City bombing, his April 19, 1995 truck bomb attack that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, a U.S. government office complex in downtown Oklahoma City, and destroyed or damaged numerous other buildings in the vicinity. The attack claimed 168 lives (including 19 children under the age of 6) and left over 600 injured in the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil prior to the September 11 attacks, and as of 2014 it remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.

The Murrah building had been previously targeted in October 1983 by white supremacist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, including founder James Ellison and Richard Snell. The group had plotted to park "a van or trailer in front of the Federal Building and blow it up with rockets detonated by a timer." After Snell's appeal for murdering two people in unrelated cases was denied, he was executed the same day as the Murrah bombing. Richard Wayne Snell (May 21, 1930 – April 19, 1995) watched the television reports of the Murrah Building bombing before he was put to death in Arkansas.

In his last words before being executed, Snell addressed then-Governor Jim Guy Tucker:

Governor Tucker, look over your shoulder; justice is coming. I wouldn't trade places with you or any of your cronies. Hell has victories. I am at peace.

Other events sharing the date of fire at Mt. Carmel have been mentioned in discussions of the Waco siege. The April 20, 1999, Columbine High School massacre might have been timed to mark either an anniversary of the FBI's assault at Waco or Adolf Hitler's birthday. Some of the connections appear coincidental. April 19 was the date from the American Revolution's opening battles ("the shot heard round the world") and was also the date of the opening of the siege on the CSAL group in Arkansas in 1985. On April 17, 2013, a fertilizer plant exploded at West near Waco, two days after the Boston Marathon bombings that some speculatively connected to an upcoming 20th anniversary of the Waco incident of 1993, as well as to an anniversary of the Virginia Tech massacre of April 16, 2007.

Another Link: Ruby Ridge

The Siege of Ruby Ridge has been cited as a precursor to what may be unfolding at the Bundy Ranch standoff. Ruby Ridge was the site of a deadly confrontation and siege in northern Idaho between August 21 – August 31, 1992 against Randy Weaver, his family and his friend Kevin Harris by agents of the United States Marshals Service (USMS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It resulted in the death of Weaver's son Sammy, his wife Vicki, and Deputy U.S. Marshal William Francis Degan.

It appears an April encounter with a helicopter was behind why people were killed at Ruby Ridge. Following an April 18, 1992 fly-over by a helicopter for the Geraldo Rivera "Now It Can Be Told" TV show, US Marshal Service HQ received media reports that Weaver had fired on the helicopter. That day in Idaho, a US Marshals team was installing surveillance cameras overlooking the Weaver property at the time of the fly-over. The field report for April 18, 1992 filed by Marshal W. Warren Mays reported seeing a helicopter near the Weaver property, but not hearing any shots fired.

Weaver then granted an interview with a newspaper reporter in which he, family and friends present that day denied firing on the helicopter. The helicopter pilot Richard Weiss eventually gave FBI FD-302 interviews denying that Weaver fired on his helicopter.

The media reports that Weaver had fired on the Rivera helicopter became part of the justification later cited by USMS Wayne "Duke" Smith and FBI HRT Commander Richard Rogers in drawing up the Ruby Ridge Rules of Engagement on August 21–22, 1992. Also, in spite of Richard Weiss' repeated denials that shots had been fired at his helicopter, US Attorney Ron Howen would charge that, as Overt Act 32 of the Weaver's Conspiracy Against the Federal Government, Randy, Vicki and Harris fired two shots at the Rivera helicopter.

Bundy

Formerly, the name "Bundy" was associated with an infamous serial killer of the 1970s. The adopted son of Johnny Culpepper Bundy, Ted Bundy (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) would go on to kill perhaps 30 young women in seven states between 1974 and 1978.

The quick meaning of the name Bundy is "free."

A little more digging shows links to the fate of Cliven Bundy:

Bundy: This interesting surname, of Anglo-Saxon origin, with variant spellings Bownd, Bownde, Bounde, was at first a status surname for a peasant farmer or husbandman. The derivation is from the Olde English pre 7th Century "bonda, bunda", reinforced by the Old Norse "bonde, bondi", in Middle English, "bonde". The ultimate derivation is disputed; it may be connected with the Olde English "buan", to dwell, hence "buende", a dweller, but is thought more likely to be from "bindan", to bind. It was originally used to signify a farmer holding lands from and bound by loyalty to a lord, and hence a free landowner. After the Norman Conquest the name became associated with the idea of bound servitude. Source.

+++++UPDATE APRIL 12, 2014+++++