Another Aurora Copycat? Or Overreaction?

The name Alemar is of Arabic origin, meaning "coated in gold." 

Alemar is a form of the Spanish name Alamar.

West Virginia law enforcement authorities feel they had a potential domestic terrorist on their hands on Monday, August 20, 2012, and several media outlets used the phrase "Aurora copycat" in their headlines. The incident unfolded in Martinsburg, West Virginia.

The Journal of Martinsburg noted:

A man wearing body armor and armed with an AR-15 training rifle, two knives and several unloaded magazines was arrested...after he was seen running in the area of Bulldog Boulevard, police said.
At about 7:17 a.m. [on Monday, August 20, 2012], the Martinsburg Police Department received several calls in regards to an individual running and carrying a rifle near the area of Bulldog Boulevard and Raleigh Street in Martinsburg.
"One of our primary concerns was that he was sighted in the general proximity or area of the high school on Bulldog Boulevard and we also believe that's what generated a lot of calls," Detective Lt. G.B. Swartwood said.

Officers responded to the scene and located the man, later identified as 23-year-old William Everett Alemar, of South Raleigh Street, near the intersection of Silver Lane and Raleigh Street. When Patrolman M. Jones, Patrolman C.M. Richmond and Patrolman First Class E. Herb encountered the individual, he was dressed in full military desert camouflage and a ballistic vest and with what appeared to be an assault rifle across his chest, police said.
All three officers engaged Alemar at gunpoint and ordered him to his knees to be taken into custody.
"The subject was then ordered to lie prone on the ground and the officers secured his weapon an AR-15(M-4) training rifle. The suspect also had two knives and several unloaded magazines, (and) his ballistic vest also contained ceramic panels to make it more bullet resistant," a police news release said.

The entire news item can be read here.

Alemar was charged with "committing a terroristic act under 61-6-24 subsection (b) and subsection (d) of the West Virginia State Code."

Police executed a search warrant at Alemar's apartment, located at 1013 S. Raleigh Street in Martinsburg. The department utilized a Loudoun County, Va., explosive detection K-9 due to concerns regarding the possibility of explosives. No explosives were located, but more military equipment and a pistol were located and seized as evidence, police said.

Stephen Alemar told The Hagerstown Herald-Mail that he believes his 23-year-old son, William Alemar, was just trying to stay in shape for his next military assignment when he was arrested near two Martinsburg schools on Monday. The younger Alemar is a member of the Virginia National Guard who served a tour of duty in Iraq.

The Octopus: The Secret Government and Death of Danny Casolaro (1996) by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith, details the strange and mysterious death of Danny Casolaro, who was an American freelance writer who came to public attention in 1991 when he was found dead in a bathtub in Room 517 at the Sheraton Hotel, Martinsburg, West Virginia. Casolaro's wrists were slashed 10–12 times, and Thomas and Keith write that the death was a "fake suicide."

"Martinsburg was founded in 1778 by General Adam Stephen who named it in honor of Colonel Thomas Bryan Martin, a nephew of Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron....In 1863, Isabelle 'Belle' Boyd, a famous spy for the Confederacy, was arrested in Martinsburg by the Union Army and imprisoned, according to what you can read here.  For more on Bell, click on "The Bell Name...."

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Religious Red Dawn?

by Loren Coleman ©2012

"There are stories of coincidence and chance, of intersections and strange things told, and which is which and who only knows? And we generally say, 'Well, if that was in a movie, I wouldn't believe it.' Someone's so-and-so met someone else's so-and-so and so on. And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that strange things happen all the time. And so it goes, and so it goes. And the book says, 'We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us.'" 

~ Paul Thomas Anderson, Magnolia, 1999.

Today is the 13th anniversary of the mass shooting by a white supremacist of a religious group of Americans. Sound familiar? It would be shortsighted to think that what happened last weekend was something new. Has the red dawn touched religious groups now?

Clearly, the Sikh Temple shooting of last Sunday, August 5, 2012, pointed out a specific kind of one of many potential vulnerable "fishbowl" sites. Workplaces, schools, churches, temples, and now theaters and gurdwara are part of the ripple targets hit after a major mass shooting receives extensive media coverage. Will a church or temple or theater be an immediate future target? How about sporting events? Let's us hope not, but let's look at what's happening, with open eyes.

Shall a Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or other group be the focus of a forthcoming violent act, as more copycat waves from Aurora and Oak Creek wash over our country? Few realized there was even a church shooting in Aurora, in April 2012.

Will August 19th (a Sunday) or August 20th (Monday, the calendar month anniversary since the Aurora red dawn event) be especially dangerous?  The shooters' killing clocks work much differently than yours and mine. We need to be aware.

The conjunction of several threads are coming together when you begin to realize that many religious groups are holding their services in movie theaters during non-movie mornings.

Indeed, one of the fastest developing trends in Christian churches has been to encourage growth, remove the fixtures of religiousness, and make people comfortable.

Many new churches look like movie theaters, and many new megachurch movements have begun in movie theaters. The overlapping of the two, for the mentally ill and disturbed, for the rage-filled and suicidal/homicidal, could become an uncomfortable focus for future mass shootings, which law enforcement agencies, religious organizations, and movie theater owners may wish to track.

To highlight how vulnerable religious organizations in group settings have been during high spree shooting times, here's a list. Let's look at just 13 years of the more prominent church, temple, and other religious-related shootings in the USA:

August 5, 2012 - Oak Creek, Wisconsin - Sikh Temple of Wisconsin - Wade Michael Page, 24, a white supremacist, hate rock band leader, and former U.S. Army psychological operations specialist, entered a Sikh gurdwara and killed six people (shown above) and wounded four others, using a Springfield XD(M) 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He shot a responding police officer, and after being shot by another responding officer, Page fatally shot himself in the head.

May 3, 2012 - Ellicott City, Maryland - St. Peter's Episcopal Church - Rev. Mary-Marguerite Kohn, co-rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, and Brenda Brewington, were killed on by a homeless man, after he was apparently turned away from the church’s food bank. The homeless man identified by authorities as Douglas Jones, who was found dead in the woods nearby the church by self-inflicted gun shot wounds.

April 22, 2012 – Aurora, Colorado - Destiny Christian Center – Police say the mother of Pastor De Lono Straham, Destiny Christian Center, was shot and killed Sunday afternoon at the end of the worship service. The police say the shooting suspect and the pastor’s mother were shot and taken to a local hospital where they both died. The suspect was shot by an off-duty Denver Police officer who was a member of the church and is the pastor’s cousin. Police currently had no motive for the shooting.

September 18, 2011 - Lakeland, Florida - Greater Faith Christian Center Church - Jeremiah Fogle, 57, was charged with murder and attempted murder after Sunday’s shootings the Lakeland church. Pastor William Boss and associate pastor Carl Stewart were shot from behind, authorities said. Boss was shot in the head, and Stewart was shot three times in the back and ear.

August 30, 2010 – Visalia, California - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - A lay bishop at a Mormon church was killed by a man who was himself killed in an ensuing confrontation with officers. Clay Sannar, a 42-year-old father of six boys, was doing administrative paperwork on Sunday between services when a man came in and asked for a leader of the congregation. The man was directed to Sannar and fatally shot him, said Colleen Mestas, the police chief in Visalia, southeast of Fresno in California’s Central Valley. Someone the called police and identified himself as the gunman. When police arrived at the church, they confronted the man and exchanged gunfire. The gunman was shot multiple times and pronounced dead. No police officers were injured. The Church later confirmed the shooter was 47-year-old Kenneth Ward, a member of the Church who resigned his membership in 2004.

February 14, 2010 - Richmond, California - Gethsemane Church of God in Chris - Three hooded men walked into this Church of God in Christ and opened fire and then fled the scene, as the singing of the choir was replaced by frightened screams. The two victims, a 14-year-old boy and a 19-year-old man, were hospitalized.

June 10, 2009 - Washington, D. C. - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - James Wenneker von Brunn, 88, white supremacist, 9/11 Truther, Obama Birther, and Holocaust denier opened fire with a .22 rifle at the Holocaust Museum, wounding at least one before being shot in the head by security officers. The gunman gravely wounded a security guard before two other officers returned fire. The guard, identified as 39-year-old Stephen Tyrone Johns of Temple Hills, Maryland, died. While awaiting trial, von Brunn died on January 6, 2010.

March 8, 2009 - Maryville, Illinois - First Baptist Church - Suspect Terry Joe Sedlacek, 27, of Troy, walked into the First Baptist Church, and shot pastor Fred Winters dead, point blank. Several church members are injured by a knife in the struggle to capture after the attack, The suspect also had stabbed himself, but survived, when his gun jammed

July 27, 2008 - Knoxville, Tennessee - Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church - Motivated by a desire to kill liberals and Democrats, gunman Jim David Adkisson fired a
Remington Model 48 12-gauge shotgun at members of the congregation during a youth performance of a musical, killing two people and wounding seven others.

December 9, 2007 - Arvada and Colorado Springs, Colorado - Youth With A Mission Center and New Life Church - Missionary-in-training Matthew Murray, 24, first shot four, killing two at one location, and then shot five, killing two sisters at the second religious location before he was shot by Jeanne Assam, a former sworn Colorado police officer and a church member acting as security. Murray took his own life after being wounded.

May 20, 2007 - Moscow, Idaho - Presbyterian Church - A standoff between police and a suspect in the shootings of three people in a church ended with three dead, including one police officer.

Aug. 12, 2007 - Neosho, Missouri - First Congregational Church - Eiken Elam Saimon shot and killed the pastor and two deacons and wounded five others.

July 28, 2006 - Seattle, Washington - Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle Building - The shooting occurred at around 4:00 p.m., when Naveed Afzal Haq shot six women, one fatally, at the building in the Belltown neighborhood. Naveed Afzal Haq had selected his target by researching "something Jewish" on the Internet.

May 21, 2006 - Baton Rouge, Louisiana - The Ministry of Jesus Christ Church - The four at the church who were killed were members of Erica Bell's family; she was abducted and murdered elsewhere; Bell's mother, church pastor Claudia Brown, was seriously wounded. Anthony Bell, 25, was the shooter.

April 9, 2005 - College Park, Georgia - A 27-year-old airman died after being shot at a church, where he had once worked as a security guard.

Feb. 26, 2006 - Detroit, Michigan - Zion Hope Missionary Baptist Church - Kevin L. Collins, who reportedly went to the church looking for his girlfriend, killed two and then later killed himself.

March 12, 2005 - Brookfield, Wisconsin - Living Church of God - Terry Ratzmann opened fire on the congregation, killing seven and wounding four before taking his own life within the Sheraton Hotel. The attack happened at the Sheraton, as the Living Church of God met on Saturday mornings at the Brookfield Sheraton Hotel for the past several years.

July 30, 2005 - College Park, Georgia - World Changers Church International - Air Force Staff Sgt. John Givens was shot five times by a police officer after charging the officer, following violent behavior.

December 17, 2004 - Garden Grove, California - Crystal Cathedral - A veteran musician at the Crystal Cathedral shoots himself to death after a nine-hour standoff.

October 5, 2003 - Atlanta, Georgia - Turner Monumental AME Church - Shelia Wilson walked into the church while preparations are being made for service and shot the pastor, her mother and then herself.

June 10, 2002 - Conception, Missouri - Benedictine monastery - Lloyd Robert Jeffress shot four monks in the monastery killing two and wounding two, before killing himself.

March 12, 2002 - Lynbrook, New York - Our Lady of Peace Catholic Church - Peter Troy, a former mental patient, opens fire during Mass, killing the priest and a parishioner. He later receives a life sentence.

May 18, 2001 - Hopkinsville, Kentucky - Greater Oak Missionary Baptist Church - Frederick Radford stood up in the middle of a revival service and began shooting at his estranged wife, Nicole Radford, killing her and a woman trying to help her.

September 15, 1999 - Fort Worth, Texas - Wedgewood Baptist Church - Larry Gene Ashbrook shot dead seven people and injured a further seven at a concert by Christian rock group Forty Days in Fort Worth, Texas before killing himself.

August 10, 1999 - Los Angeles, California - North Valley Jewish Community Center - A shooting occurred at around 10:50 a.m., when white supremacist Buford O. Furrow, Jr. walked into the lobby of the Jewish community center in Granada Hills, Los Angeles, and opened fire with a semiautomatic weapon, fired 70 shots into the complex. The gunfire wounded five people: three children, a teenage counselor, and an office worker. Shortly thereafter, Furrow murdered a mail carrier, fled the state, and finally surrendered to authorities.

April 15, 1999 - Salt Lake City, Utah - LDS Church Family History Library - Sergei Babarin, 70, with a history of mental illness, entered the library, killed two people and wounded four others before he was gunned down by police.

Footnote: Other mass shootings have had religious undertones, as well, such as the "Jew cafe" comments of the Dawson College shooter or the Amish School killings, but the above list attempts to capture those violent incidents that appear to target groups at specific religiously identified sites.

The Copycat Effect

(NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004) 

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Contagious Killer Copycats

People online are making the mistake of saying the Sikh Temple incident is not a copycat of the Aurora red dawn event. In general, there appears to be a general misunderstanding of the form that outbursts of contagion can take during a time of increased levels of violence. The modeling of killings to the vulnerable/violent/suicidal individuals, as expressed by these rare few people who engage in these behaviors, can present in many ways. The Aurora violence and resulting media attention was the eruption, and the minor and major seismic waves, including the significant Oak Creek shooting, are the ripples from that initial, renewed activity. These patterns are predictable, and they can take many articulations.

Don't you know it's darkest before the dawn

And it's this thought keeps me moving on

If we could heed these early warnings

The time is now quite early morning

~ Pete Seeger

Here is how I stated my sense of what's going on during times like what we are seeing right now, from my book, The Copycat Effect (NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004):

It became clear by the late 1990s that reports of workplace violence were not always just followed by other copycats of workplace incidents a day or a week later, but sometimes by other forms of mass and rampage violence as well. For example in the first week of November 1999, two workplace shootings on a Tuesday and a Wednesday shook the United States, which was already reeling from a long string of office and school killings for the year. In Seattle and Honolulu, the families of nine victims grieved as observers debated how to keep violence out of public settings traditionally considered safe.

In Honolulu, seven people were shot to death when Xerox technician Brian Uyesugi walked into a second-floor meeting room of the Xerox's offices and opened fire. He shot all the victims at close range with a 9mm handgun.

In Seattle, the next day a gunman shot and killed two men and wounded two others in a shipyard office. Wearing a dark trench coat over camouflage clothing, the gunman had walked into the Northlake Shipyard building and proceeded down a long hallway and into a back office before wordlessly opening fire and shooting all four men in the room with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. Two 9 mm guns, two Pacific Rim cities, two days of killings. Ten days later, another school shooting occurred in New Mexico.
One type of copycat event was reinforcing another—and people were beginning to take notice.
In early July 2003, author Kate Randall, writing in WSW News, observed that in “the past week has witnessed an uncommonly large number of violent incidents—including two workplace shootings, murder-suicides and multiple homicides. Three teenagers were also arrested for allegedly plotting a killing rampage. Between July 1 and July 8, 20 individuals were killed in these incidents and another 14 wounded… Also on July 8, police found the bodies of four people, apparent victims of a murder-suicide, in a small, well-kept ranch-style home in Magnolia, N.J.…Another multiple shooting was discovered on July 8, this time in Bakersfield, Calif. The bodies of a grandmother, mother and three young children were all found shot dead in their home.”
When such clustering occurs, with its mix of violence types, the copycatting is spreading from one type of incident to another. "Absolutely, there's a copycat aspect to workplace violence," James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, told the Christian Science Monitor in 2001. "There's a copycat aspect to virtually all high-profile, high-visibility crimes."

To more clearly explain the "copycat effect," here is this section, also from The Copycat Effect:

The pattern is called the “copycat effect.” It is also known as “imitation” or the “contagion effect.” And what it deals with is the power of the mass communication and culture to create an epidemic of similar behaviors.
The copycat effect is the dirty little secret of the media. That doesn’t prevent the media from calling the various epidemics of similar behaviors the “copycat” phenomenon, often for shock impact. But curiously, their use of the phrase seems to put a distance between the events and the reporting media, and allows them the stance that implies we are not part of the problem. But they are.

Sociologists studying the media and the cultural contagion of suicidal behaviors were the first to recognize the copycat effect. In 1974, University of California at San Diego sociologist David P. Phillips coined the phrase, “The Werther Effect,” to describe the copycat phenomenon. The word “Werther” comes from a 1774 novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of Faust. In the story, the youthful character Werther falls in love with a woman who is promised to another. Always melodramatic, Werther decides that his life cannot go on, and that his love is lost. He then dresses in boots, a blue coat, and a yellow vest, sits at his desk with an open book, and, literally at the 11th hour, shoots himself. In the years that followed, throughout Europe, so many young men shot themselves while dressed as Werther had been and seated at their writing desks with an open copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in front of them, that the book was banned in Italy, Germany, and Denmark.
Though an awareness of this phenomenon has been around for centuries, Phillips was the first to conduct formal studies suggesting that the Werther Effect was, indeed, a reality--that massive media attention and the retelling of the specific details of a suicide (or, in some cases, untimely deaths) could increase the number of suicides.

The August 1962 suicide of Marilyn Monroe presents a classic modern day example of the Werther Effect. In the month that followed it, one hundred, ninety-seven individual suicides – mostly of young, blonde women -- appear to have used the Hollywood star's suicide as a model for their own. The overall suicide rate in the US increased by 12 percent for the month after the news of Monroe’s suicide. But, as Phillips and others discovered, there was no corresponding decrease in suicides after the increase from the Marilyn Monroe-effect suicides. In other words, the star’s suicide actually appeared to have caused a whole population of vulnerable individuals to complete their own deaths, over and above what would be normally expected. This is the copycat effect working with a vengeance.

* * *

Please see the updated "Aurora Copycat Effect: The Complete List" by clicking here. One of the recent copycats you might not have read about includes a man with the ghostly name Casper in Eagan, Minnesota. Recall that alleged Aurora suspect's name is James Eagan Holmes. Casper yelled to the police officers, as he was being arrested, that he should be the "Joker," and "I wouldn't own a gun, but if I did, I would do what Holmes did. I would blow people away. Put me in jail for the rest of my life, I don't care. Put me in jail with criminals. I grab them by the throat and kill them."

* * *

The overlapping ensemble cast between Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy, all Christopher Nolan films, is quite evident. One movie of Nolan's is a sychophant of the other, and is the elephant in the middle of the room.

"I'm going to improvise. Listen, there's something you should know about me... about inception. An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed 

of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you." 

~ Christopher Nolan, Inception (2010).

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London Disaster?

Is there a general sense that the London Olympics may result in a disaster? Why is that? There's nothing here but doom, gloom, and missteps, methinks. And those seem only be Romney's.

Well, according to some, it is in the cards. Or by coincidence, actually, it is shown on a card hinting at Big Ben toppling. (It's not. It's a Japanese site.) The card's art was created 17 years ago and holds some credibility due to the fact they show other images matching red dawn moments today we call simply "9/11."

Combined disasters. Shared disasters. Disasters. A bad star rising. A red dawn.

From Italian disastro, disaster; originally meaning "unfavorable to one's stars", from dis-Italian, dis-, bad (compare dys-), + astro, star, celestial body, from Latin astrum, from Greek astron.

The Advent of Deception site made the following observation:

Steve Jackson created The Illuminati Card Game in 1995 that consists of 330 cards. Two of the cards portray the Twin Towers of New York bombed and the Pentagon. Out of the 330 cards, there is one card that projects Olympic colors that are within the "Combined Disaster Card." We view Big Ben in the background and five people wearing the colors of the Olympics.

Big Ben? Apparently not: Most have identified it as the Ginza Wako clock tower from Tokyo, with 11:11 on the clock face. (See comments below.)

But the World Trade Center/Twin Towers card sure has the blogosphere talking.

The comparative imagery between the 1995 cards and
the photos of the 2001 events is haunting.

What are we to think about the wild imaginings coming from some circles being associated with these Olympics? I previously posted some of this imagery. Below is another example, via RPJ:

Credit: Boing Boing

Do you think London is a little tense right now?

On Thursday night, July 26, 2012, the following came across Twitter, via "Breaking News UK ‏@BreakingNewsUK"

London police briefly evacuate Westfield mall outside Olympic Park - @AP

and then

Update: People are being let back into Westfield mall near Olympic park; no word yet on what triggered the alarm - @AP

Media accounts later mentioned:

Police said a fire alarm forced authorities to briefly clear the sprawling mall beside the Olympic Park. The alarms sent hundreds of people into the streets amid wailing alarms a day before the opening ceremony of the Summer Games. Fears of terrorism have been at the center of preparations for the Olympics, and authorities have twice been forced to deploy troops when security arrangements fell short. Police allowed shoppers to return after a few minutes. Westfield mall authorities said the alarm was triggered in a restaurant area.

Mitt Romney remarked almost as soon as he arrived in the UK that security levels at the London Olympics were "disconcerting." Mitt Romney appeared to be raising questions about safety at the London Olympics. The newspapers reacted quickly to his comments:

A headline Thursday on the Web site of the Guardian newspaper said, “Mitt Romney’s Olympics blunder stuns No. 10 and hands gift to Obama,” while the Telegraph published an opinion column with a sub-headline that read: “Mitt Romney is perhaps the only politician who could start a trip that was supposed to be a charm offensive by being utterly devoid of charm and mildly offensive.”

Anniversaries, of course, are on the minds of British subjects:

The 7 July 2005 London bombings (often referred to as 7/7) were a series of co-ordinated suicide attacks in London which targeted civilians using thepublic transport system during the morning rush hour. On the morning of Thursday, 7 July 2005, four Islamist home-grown terroristsdetonated four bombs, three in quick succession aboard London Underground trains across the city and, later, a fourth on a double-decker bus in Tavistock Square. Fifty-two civilians and the four bombers were killed in the attacks, and over 700 more were injured. The attack happened 24 hours after the city was selected to host the 2012 Summer Olympics.

And...for tomorrow...

At 21:15 hrs on 28 July 2003 a bomb placed under a seat of a B.E.S.T. bus exploded on the busy Lal Bahadur Shastri Marg in Ghatkopar, India. The bomb was placed in the rear of the bus and killed 4 people and injured 32. A man who was riding a motorcycle behind the bus and a woman who was in a rikshaw travelling near the bus were among those killed. An eyewitness claims that the woman was thrown at least 10 feet away from the rikshaw and died on the spot.

Meanwhile, back in the States, one of our eyes is on possible Aurora copycats or some other storms coming. Rumblings are already here. It seems an Ohio man called 911 threatening a Colorado shooting for Ohio. They arrested him. Other weird incidents have happened, some seem to be bad choices of behavior related to costumes.

You have noted here my awareness of the "name game."

MAH shared an intriguing paragraph from yesterday's Los Angeles Times about the "curse invoked by Holmes' name" with regard to a call for suppressing Holmes' name as a way out of the copycat syndrome:

Names have always been the subject of magical thinking -- the ancient Romans buried lead tablets invoking the names of spirits, gods or the dead in order to curse their enemies, just as one example -- so maybe it shouldn't be too surprising that many people think uttering the name "James Holmes," like an unguarded mention of the name "Voldemort" in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, will cause bad things to happen...The curse invoked by Holmes' name, according to some, will take the form of other mass shootings. Indiscriminate killers seem to crave fame and notoriety; take those away, the theory goes, and there will be no reason for troubled loners of the future to strap on weapons and shoot up the local post office/mall/campus/movie theater.

More about other things soon, after we get through July 27th and the rest of this weekend.

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