Brazil's Columbine: Ten Dead in School Shooting

Two former students opened fire at a Suzano, Brazil school on Wednesday, March 13, 2019, and killed at least six teenagers as well as two school officials before dying by suicide in an attack that police said was inspired by the 1999 Columbine massacre in the United States. The two armed men were wearing face masks or hoods. They shot and killed the six children who were on their snack break, as well as two school officials, before fatally turning their guns on themselves.

They reportedly were carrying firearms, crossbows, and homemade bombs.

The gunmen have been identified as Guilherme Taucci Monteiro, 17 years old, and Luiz Henrique de Castro, 25 years old. Monteiro (pictured) posted images of himself on Facebook shortly before the attack.

Before entering the Raul Brasil School in Suzano near Sao Paulo, the former pupils shot and killed the younger assailant's uncle, who owned a car rental agency where they stole a vehicle.

Ten people, including the two attackers, were therefore killed in total, Sao Paulo police said. The students who were killed were boys mostly 15 and 16 years old.

h/t Rodrigo Craveiro

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A Columbine copycat? A few media accounts in Brazil are discussing this school shooting as a copycat of the 1999 Columbine attack, which involved two young men with multiple fatalities. But this date is filled with anniversaries.

March 13, 1943, is the date on which the Nazis liquidated the Jewish ghetto in Kraków, Poland.

This Brazilian shooting occurred on the anniversary of the Dunblane shooting in Scotland where 16 youth and a teacher were killed, ending in the suicide of the gunman. On March 13, 1996, Thomas Watt* Hamilton, a local Stirlingshire man, shot dead 16 children and their teacher, Gwen Mayor, in Dunblane Primary School's gymnasium before killing himself. He used his licensed weapons and ammunition.

This is not the first mass school shooting in Brazil. On the morning of April 7, 2011, twelve children aged between 12 and 14 were killed and 12 others seriously wounded by an armed man who entered Tasso da Silveira Municipal School (Escola Municipal Tasso da Silveira), an elementary school in Realengo on the western fringe of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In 2015, there was a fatal school incident in Spain. 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. Since it occurred on April 20, 2015, a direct Columbine date copycat. See my analysis here.

While the Columbine High School shootings on April 20, 1999, became the modern template for school shootings, as noted in great detail in my 2004 book, The Copycat Effect, the "modern era" of school shootings began in the USA on February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington.

The new pattern that was shown in that shooting was of a male student (not an outsider) entering the school and killing his classmates and teachers. In the Moses Lake event, Barry Loukaitis, 14, in this Columbine precusor, dressed all in black, including a long coat (apparently more of a Western duster than a trenchcoat), held his algebra class hostage, killed two students, wounded another severely, and killed his algebra teacher, Leona Caires.

Loukaitis then turned to the class and said "This sure beats algebra, doesn't it?"

The quotation was nearly a direct one taken from a Stephen King book, Rage, about a school shooting of an algebra teacher that Loukaitis allegedly used as the model for his attack. The first novel by Stephen King published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1977. King withdrew the book from publication three years later, after Columbine.

What subject did the Brazilian adults who were killed teach? The Brazilian shooters were students of mass violence.

Loukaitis had planned the shootings carefully, getting ideas, he said, from the Stephen King book Rage (1977). In it, a troubled high school boy takes a gun to fictional Placerville High School, kills his algebra teacher “Mrs. Underwood,” another school adult “Mr. Vance,” and takes the algebra classhostage. Police would find a collection of Stephen King's books in Loukaitis' bedroom, including his well-worn copy of Rage.

The Rage scenario had been played out before in real life. At Valley High School, Las Vegas, Nevada, on March 19, 1982, after algebra teacher Clarence Piggot refused to cancel a public speaking assignment; 17-year-old Patrick Lizotte gunned him down. Patrick also wounded two other 17-year-old students during his rampage. He left the school and was killed nearby during a shootout with the police. On January 18, 1993, Scott Pennington, 17, took his senior English class captive at East Carter High School, in Grayson, Kentucky. He killed his teacher and a custodian. Pennington would tell investigators later that he only read Rage after the shooting. In 1997, Rage would be linked to another shooting. A copy of Rage was found in the locker of Michael Carneal, a high school shooter in West Paducah, Kentucky.

Stephen King discussed the role of Rage after the Loukaitis shootings and eventually King apologized for writing the book, saying he penned it during a troubling period in his life. He said he wished it never had been published. Finally in 1999, he told his publisher to pull it from publication and took it out-of-print. He told the Today Show’s Katie Couric: “I took a look at Rage and said to myself, if this book is acting as any sort of accelerate, if it’s having any effect on any of these kids at all, I don’t want anything to do with it, regardless of what may be the moral and legal rights and wrongs. Even talking about it makes me nervous.”

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* In The Rebirth of Pan: Hidden Faces of the American Earth Spirit, Jim Brandon writes, regarding the overall "name game":

I'm not talking here of such spooky tongue-twisters as H.P. Lovecraft's Yog-Sothoth or Arthur Machen's Ishakshar, but of quite ordinary names like Bell, Beall and variants, Crowley, Francis, Grafton, Grubb, Magee/McGee, Mason, McKinney, Montpelier, Parsons, Pike, Shelby, Vernon, Watson/Watt, Williams/Williamson. I have others on file, but these are the ones which I have accumulated the most instances.

Emphasis added. ~ Loren Coleman 

Sadly, Suffer The Little Children

Some sad, weird stories are crossing my desk, about kids, about deaths, about this time of year, and, of course, once again, from the Atlanta area. Maybe there's someone out there who can see some patterns or meaning in all of this horrible news.

First, something seemed to be in the wind about the Summer Solstice, more so than normal, this year. There was a rash of stories, seemingly causing some Satanic smoldering about the dates June 20-25. See  "Satanists & Solstice Slayings." Of course, there was a hint of bizarreness just before the 21st on "Friday the 13th at Waffle House." Earlier, in May, a "Man Robbed A Waffle House With A Pitchfork."

The three Waffle House incidents - the pitchfork robbery at a WH, the killing of an on-duty policeman working as a security guard at a WH, and a WH employee shooting and killing a customer - all happened at Atlanta-area Waffle Houses.

In a strange link to Atlanta and an old name game previously identified here (= Tecumseh), the William Tecumseh Sherman monument (above) at the Grand Army Plaza in New York City was in the news because it is losing its gold covering. Tecumseh also showed up in the news this week with a lightning fire in Tecumseh, Ontario; a horse being killed in a fire in Tecumseh, Oklahoma; and a shooting at the intersection of Gloster and Tecumseh streets in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to name but a few examples.

The Union general who burned Atlanta was named after the great Shawnee prophet Tecumseh.

When another human tragedy struck, late in June, it was no surprise that the Atlanta area was a focus again. A toddler had been found dead, and had apparently been left alone for hours in a hot car. The distraught father blamed himself and faced serious criminal charges.
But there is a bit of mystery here. What was the truth behind the incident?

Cobb County, Georgia, police imply there is more -- much more -- to the story.
"Much has changed about the circumstances leading up to the death of this 22-month-old [Cooper Harris, pictured at top] since it was first reported," Cobb County Police Sgt. Dana Pierce told CNN. He would not elaborate, citing an ongoing investigation, but his words made it clear this was not just another case of a young life left and lost to heat exposure in a hot car.
Shocking details in hot car death case
"I've been in law enforcement for 34 years. What I know about this case shocks my conscience as a police officer, a father and a grandfather," said Pierce.

 

Initially, Justin Ross Harris, 33, (pictured) told Cobb County police that he accidentally left his toddler son in his SUV on Wednesday. According to police, Harris told them he had forgotten to drop the child off at a daycare center, before going to work.
Harris initially told police he realized that he'd left the boy strapped in his car seat as he drove home Wednesday afternoon.
Investigators say patrol officers were in the area of the Akers Mill Square shopping center in the suburban Atlanta county when dispatchers received the calls from witnesses around 4:20 p.m.
"He kept saying, 'What have I done? What have I done?'" Dale Hamilton told CNN affiliate WSB-TV.
"Within moments of the first responders getting to the scene and doing their job and questions began to be asked about the moments that led up to their arrival at the scene, some of those answers were not making sense to the first responders," Pierce of Cobb County Police said.
On Thursday, Harris pleaded not guilty to felony murder and cruelty to children charges. He's being held without bond at the Cobb County Jail.
CNN spoke with the child's mother, Leanna Harris, on Friday. Harris says she's been advised not to discuss the case with the media.
"We have been in communication with the mother throughout the investigation. At this time, I'm not at liberty to discuss her involvement. That's a part of the case our detectives are working on," Pierce said....
According to the arrest warrant, the temperature reached 88 degrees in the area on Wednesday. Police said medical personnel believed the child had been in the SUV since 9 a.m., as Harris said.
But Pierce told CNN on Friday, "I cannot confirm that the child, as originally reported, was in the car at 9 a.m." ~ CNN

What's worse, there was another such death.

The [Atlanta-area] toddler's death was the second this week of a child in a hot car. On Monday, a 9-month-old girl died in Rockledge, Fla., after her father forgot to drop her off at her grandmother's house, leaving her in the back seat of his pickup truck for several hours as he worked at his job as a telephone solicitor for the Fraternal Order of Police.
As of Thursday, no charges had been filed against Steven Lillie, 31, of Cocoa, Fla. Rockledge Police say they still are investigating the death and allowing Lillie and his girlfriend, the child's mother, to grieve the loss.
"She's been in the car for hours, and I absolutely forgot about her," Lillie said during a 9-1-1 call Monday to police dispatchers. "She's not alive." USA Today.

Thus far, in 2014, the following incidents have occurred:

Incident #	Date	Location	Temperature	Name	Age
	June
13*	06/18/14	Cobb County, GA	91°	Cooper Harris	22 mo
12*	06/16/14	Rockledge, FL	91°	Anna  Lillie	9 mo
11*	06/12/14	Ardmore, OK	84°	Mason Ryan Wood	2 mo
10	06/10/14	Flint, TX	88°	Bella Lindstrom	4 yr
9	06/08/14	Sarasota, FL	85°	Alejandra Hernandez	2 yr
8	06/04/14	Dolgeville, NY	73°	Sophia Lea Marie Lyon	15 mo
	May
7	05/25/14	Florence, SC	86°	Jeremiah A. Kennedy	13 mo
6	05/25/14	Princeton, IL	84°	Logan Jacobs	5 yr
5	05/12/14	Clarkston, GA	87°	Julius Meh	2 yr
4	05/08/14	Hartsville, SC	93°	Sophia Goyeneche	13 mo
	April
3	04/29/14	Bakersfield, CA	87°	Fernando Velasquez	5 yr
2*	04/22/14	North Richland Hills, TX	84°	Aurora Hollingsworth	17 mo
1	04/16/14	San Jose, CA	80°	Giovanni Alonzo Hernandez	9 mo

For 2013, see the list here.

"Suffer the little children" seemed a fitting headline for this posting.

But Jesus said, "Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven." ~ Matthew 19:14, English Revised Version, The Bible

Just to clarify, as pointed out by RC in a comment to me, the use of the word "suffer" in the biblical sense means to "allow" as in "allow the children to come to me."

What is the paradox is how the meaning has changed for people from Stephen King (see at bottom) to the self-styled Satanists.

Meanwhile, the BeforeItNews folks wanted to turn everyone's attention to Denver, Colorado, over the Solstice weekend. There was talk of the sacrifice of a human child there, due to the Summer Solstice.

It was also pointed out that around the time of the Summer Solstice in 2013, in Midwest City, Oklahoma,

a toddler was held hostage [on June 17th] at Walmart, the suspected criminal claimed he was part of a Satanic cult.
News9 reported Sammie Lamont Wallace grabbed the two-year-old child at knifepoint and began speaking about the Illuminati and a satanic cult. Police said they began to research the things Wallace said, and found out that the day of the incident linked to a day of human sacrifice.
Police shot and killed Wallace after he began to make attempts on the girl's life. According to the police report they found religious writings in a notebook to validate his actions. See a report that further explains the story here.

###

A school shooting, Stephen King, and Miss Sibley.

"Suffer the Little Children" is a February 1972 short story by Stephen King. 

As King developed the tale, it was one about a school shooting long before the modern era of such events.

The plot centers on a frightened third grade teacher, Miss Emily Sidley, who brings her deceased brother's gun to school. There she takes twelve of her students to a room and shoots each one dead. Soon, she is interrupted by another teacher, and stops before she can kill another student.

Miss Sidley is sent to a mental hospital after the murders, and eventually takes her own life.

In 1993, King wrote that the story had "no redeeming social merit whatever."

Later, Stephen King discussed the role of his book Rage (which also contains a school shooting) after the school shootings by Barry Loukaitis of February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington. Eventually King apologized for writing the book, saying he penned it during a troubling period in his life. He said he wished it never had been published. Finally in 1999, after Columbine, King told his publisher to pull it from publication and took it out-of-print. He told the Today Show’s Katie Couric: “I took a look at Rage and said to myself, if this book is acting as any sort of accelerate, if it’s having any effect on any of these kids at all, I don’t want anything to do with it, regardless of what may be the moral and legal rights and wrongs. Even talking about it makes me nervous.”

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H/T to Sibyl Hunter for some hints.
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For a followup, see Suffer The Little Children, Part II. 

Rage School in the News

A day after I talked about the first modern era school shooting in 1996 - which ended in students and a math teacher killed - and which was inspired by Stephen King's Rage - today that same school is the center of a violent school incident.

(CNN) -- A Washington state middle school boy was arrested Wednesday and faces an attempted murder charge, after he brought 400 rounds of ammunition, multiple knives and a handgun to his school, police said.

The 11-year-old was booked into a juvenile detention facility after the incident that caused the lockdown of Frontier Middle School, Vancouver Police said.

The school, in Vancouver, Washington, was locked down for about two hours. Parents received letters alerting them of the situation, said Kris Fay, a spokeswoman for the Evergreen School District.

There were no injuries. Police did not say who was allegedly being targeted.

Note the spokeswoman is named Fay. (For significance, see "The Fayette Factor.")

The earlier Frontier Middle School shooting was a school shooting that occurred on February 2, 1996 at Frontier Middle School in Moses Lake, Washington, United States. The gunman, 14-year-old Barry Dale Loukaitis (born February 26, 1981), killed his algebra teacher and two students, and held his classmates hostage for ten minutes before a gym coach subdued Loukaitis. He is currently serving two life sentences and an additional 205 years in prison.

They Are Killing Math Teachers

Two math teachers have been killed in two days, in school violence incidents in Nevada and Massachusetts. The killing of math teachers initially surfaced at the beginning of the modern era of school shootings.

More on that history in a moment, but first, some details on today's event.

Investigators search the woods behind the high school in Danvers

The 14-year-old boy who was arraigned (October 23, 2013) Wednesday afternoon on a murder charge in the death of a Massachusetts teacher was named in court as Philip Chism. He is being held without opportunity for bail in the death of Colleen Ritzer, a teacher at Danvers High School in Danvers, Massachusetts.

WCVB-TV reports that after the gruesome killing Chism (pictured) walked to the nearest movie theater and watched Blue Jasmine, a movie about a middle-aged woman's mental breakdown.

The 14-year-old boy was being held on suspicion of murder Wednesday after the body of a female teacher was found in woods near the high school in Danvers, Massachusetts. All seven schools in the suburban Boston town were closed as a result of the investigation. The report of Colleen Ritzer's death comes two days after a student with a gun killed a teacher in Sparks, Nevada.

Authorities found Ritzer's body behind Danvers High School after the 24-year-old failed to return home after classes Tuesday, the Essex County District Attorney's Office said. Searchers found blood in a second-floor bathroom, District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett told reporters at a news conference. He did not release the cause of her death. The boy, who also had been reported missing Tuesday afternoon, was arrested early Wednesday after being found walking down a street, Blodgett said.

There are no other suspects, he said. He was arraigned Wednesday afternoon in Salem, Massachusetts, on a murder charge and was ordered held without bail. Blodgett did not say whether the boy is a student at the school and said he could not release the boy's name or his connection to Ritzer because he is a juvenile. "This is a terrible tragedy for Colleen Ritzer and the entire Danvers community," Blodgett said. Ritzer graduated from Assumption College in 2011, the school said on Twitter. She in was pursuing a master's degree in school counseling at Salem State University, that school said in a prepared statement.

"As a dedicated teacher, Colleen wanted to work with and help children with special needs," an e-mail from the university read. "She believed children have much to offer and often do not realize how special they are as individuals.

In her application to Salem State she said she was dedicated to 'helping students in times of need.' " Ritzer's aunt, Shirley Martellucci, said the family was in shock. "We're holding up as best we can," she said. Ritzer, who lived with her parents, was in her second year teaching at the school and was working on her master's degree, Martellucci said. She had never had any trouble with students, she said. "She always wanted to be a teacher, all her life," Martellucci said.

"It's just unbelievable that someone would take her life at such a young age." Ritzer's students were similarly dismayed.

Freshman Spencer Wade described Ritzer as "one of the best math teachers I've ever had."

As noted in great detail in The Copycat Effect, the "modern era" of school shootings began in the USA on February 2, 1996, in Moses Lake, Washington.

The new pattern that was shown in that shooting was of a male student (not an outsider) entering the school and killing his classmates and teachers. In the Moses Lake event, Barry Loukaitis, 14, in this Columbine precusor, dressed all in black, including a long coat (apparently more of a Western duster than a trenchcoat), held his algebra class hostage, killed two students, wounded another severely, and killed his algebra teacher, Leona Caires.

Loukaitis then turned to the class and said "This sure beats algebra, doesn't it?"

The quotation was nearly a direct one taken from a Stephen King book, Rage, about a school shooting of an algebra teacher that Loukaitis allegedly used as the model for his attack. The first novel by Stephen Kingpublished under the pseudonym Richard Bachman in 1977. King withdrew the book from publication three years later, after Columbine.

Loukaitis had planned the shootings carefully, getting ideas, he said, from the Stephen King book Rage (1977). In it, a troubled high school boy takes a gun to fictional Placerville High School, kills his algebra teacher “Mrs. Underwood,” another school adult “Mr. Vance,” and takes the algebra class hostage. Police would find a collection of Stephen King's books in Loukaitis' bedroom, including his well-worn copy of Rage.

The Rage scenario had been played out before in real life. At Valley High School, Las Vegas, Nevada, on March 19, 1982, after algebra teacher Clarence Piggot refused to cancel a public speaking assignment; 17-year-old Patrick Lizotte gunned him down. Patrick also wounded two other 17-year-old students during his rampage. He left the school and was killed nearby during a shootout with the police. On January 18, 1993, Scott Pennington, 17, took his senior English class captive at East Carter High School, in Grayson, Kentucky. He killed his teacher and a custodian. Pennington would tell investigators later that he only read Rage after the shooting. In 1997, Rage would be linked to another shooting. A copy of Rage was found in the locker of Michael Carneal, a high school shooter in West Paducah, Kentucky.

Stephen King discussed the role of Rage after the Loukaitis shootings and eventually King apologized for writing the book, saying he penned it during a troubling period in his life. He said he wished it never had been published. Finally in 1999, he told his publisher to pull it from publication and took it out-of-print. He told the Today Show’s Katie Couric: “I took a look at Rage and said to myself, if this book is acting as any sort of accelerate, if it’s having any effect on any of these kids at all, I don’t want anything to do with it, regardless of what may be the moral and legal rights and wrongs. Even talking about it makes me nervous.”