Phoenix Shooting: 3 Dead & the Other James Holmes

Phoenix police confirmed that Steve Singer died from his injuries in the shooting. Singer owned Fusion Contact Centers, LLC, a local call center business.

The Aurora shooting suspect is named James Holmes.

But there is another James Holmes.

For several months before the July 20, 2012 theater event, a Phoenix police officer played the sync in his several media appearances. 

His name game name is James Holmes.

I wrote the paragraph above on December 22, 2012, and put it away in a draft on this blog. It seemed unnecessary to bring attention to this man, doing his duty, just because he happened to share two parts of the name of the Aurora suspect. 

"They're all around the high schools, and don't think that it's just south and west, because it's happening up north," Phoenix police Officer James Holmes 

said about teen fight clubs in June 2012 .

On January 30, 2013, events conspired to bring Officer James Holmes to the fore of another mass shooting. One person was dead and 70-year-old William Arthur Harmon III was declared the suspect. The person bringing this information to the media? James Holmes.

Phoenix Police Media Relations Officer James Holmes is shown on the scene of another local crime event over two years ago.

Today, headlines shouted out, "Six people injured in Phoenix, Arizona mass shooting."

The shooting occurred around 10:30 a.m. MST (12:30 p.m. EST) at an office building in Phoenix, Arizona. Police believe that the shooter is a white male in his 60s, who was seen fleeing the scene in a white SUV.... After being questioned by reporters, Officer James Holmes said the shooter appears to have been working alone and that the reason behind the attack remains unknown. Source.

In a breaking report, Yahoo News posted this early:

Phoenix Police spokesman James Holmes said the people who were shot were taken from the scene to a local hospital, and there was no immediate word on their condition.

Changing their story later to delete Holmes' first name entirely, and leaving this awful reference, it appeared in their later article:

Police said they were searching for a white man in his sixties with gray hair. "Some say he left the building in a vehicle, and some say that he was still inside, so that's kind of where we are at," police spokesman Holmes said.

The gunfire occurred at an office complex on 16th Street north of Glendale Avenue.

The Arizona Republic reported that Mark Hummels, a partner with Osborn Maledon and president of the Phoenix chapter of the Federal Bar Association, is among the wounded. He was shot after leaving a mediation session, and was reported to have a strong pulse after surgery.

2nd Victim Dies: Mark Hummels (Source: omlaw.com)

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UPDATE:

Mark Hummels, the attorney gravely wounded in a downtown office shooting Wednesday, died Thursday night after being taken off life support, according to his colleagues at the law firm of Osborn Maledon.

Hummels, 43, was one of three people police said were shot by Arthur Douglas Harmon, 70, apparently over a long-running financial dispute.

Steven Singer, 48, a call-center company CEO, died from his wounds Wednesday; Harmon’s body was found Thursday in Mesa, dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound; a third victim shot in the hand, Nicole Hampton, 32, is expected to be released from hospital Friday.

Doctors declared Hummels to be brain-dead as a result of his injuries, according to the Arizona Republic on February 1, 2013.



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Steve Martos, also of the Phoenix Police Department, said officers staged outside a home in the area of 14600 block of North 28th Street in Phoenix in connection to the shooting. Police have said they believe the home is connected in some way to the office shooting.

The timing was another one of those "coincidences," for the Phoenix shooting was mentioned during today's first day of congressional hearings about gun violence by victims from the Tuscon, Arizona shooting. Mark Kelly (a twin), the former shuttle astronaut and husband of former Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, told the Senate panel that there had been "what seems to be a shooting with multiple victims with multiple shots fired."

Sikh Shooter Id

The early reports were sketchy. But now we know what the Sikh temple shooter was. He allegedly was an Army veteran, a racist, a supremacist, and a murderer. He sported a 9/11 tattoo. He lived on Holmes Avenue. Considering that James Holmes is the alleged shooter in Aurora, that is the kind of coincidence even a scriptwriter would be told not to put into a movie.

We also know the who. Sources have identified the dead suspect as Wade Michael Page. Reportedly, he was formerly connected to the Fort Bragg Army base at Fayetteville, North Carolina.

In Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a Sikh temple committee member, Ven Boba Ri, told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that people inside the temple described the shooter as a white male in his 30s. Ri further reported to the Journal-Sentinel that the gunman walked up to a Sikh priest who was standing outside the temple and shot him. Then he went inside and started shooting.

The UK's Daily Mail reported, "The lone gunman, who was shot down outside the temple, was allegedly wearing tactical gear and was armed with a single handgun. He was described by witnesses as a white male in his thirties."

The days of late have been framed by breaking news, screaming headlines, and visual overkill, from Oak Creek, Aurora, and Tucson. Is there any surprise that copycat violence is back in the news?

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Remember the Tube poster from the Olympics, the one with the red-haired figure in it? (See at the bottom of this posting.) Well, look over to the right, separate and alone. That person there is a Sikh.

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The Copycat Effect

(NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004)