Is There Racism In Reporting School Shootings?

Deciding what was racist use to be so easy. Today, the media, sometimes due to law enforcement, sometimes not, is putting out confusing messages.

Take for instance news out of Portland, Oregon on Friday.

Four students were shot in front of a peace mural just outside of their alternative Rosemary Anderson High School in Portland, Oregon, at a North Killingsworth location. The gunmen fled the scene, prompting panic and a massive search on an otherwise quiet Friday on December 12, 2014.

Portland Police Department spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson told the media that it could be “gang related.”

Describing those involved as AfricanAmericans, Simpson said, "The suspect may be affiliated with a gang but it's not known if the shooting was gang-related or 'a personal beef.'"

One victim, Taylor Zimmers, 16, was in critical condition. Two more, David Jackson-Liday, 20, and Labraye Franklin, 17, were in fair condition. Olyvia Batson, 17, was treated at the scene after a bullet grazed her foot.

The family of one of the victims told KATU News that he has “no gang affiliations.”

Confusing reports of a "drive-by" shooting turned into eyewitness accounts that the gunman or gunmen had "run away" from the scene.

Was it a school shooting or not? The media appears confused by how to handle shootings at schools involving blacks.

Portland, Oregon, police arrested a 22-year-old man, Lonzo Murphy (pictured), early Saturday in connection with the shooting.

Okay, let's review: The Friday shooting appeared to be gang-related, police said. Witnesses told authorities there may have been a dispute outside Rosemary Anderson High School just before the shooting occurred at a street corner. The victims are students or in affiliated job training programs.

Gang investigators "feel comfortable saying this is a gang-related shooting based on some of the people involved," Sgt. Pete Simpson said. Police believe the shooter has gang ties. 

But there's no real evidence of any of those statements.

Another school shooting occurred about six months earlier in the Portland area. A 14-year-old freshman at the school, named Emilio Hoffman, was killed. A male teen gunman with a semi-automatic weapon (reportedly an AK-15) and one victim were both dead after shots were fired at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Multnomah County, Oregon on June 10, 2014. The killer was identified as Jared Michael Padgett.

The Portland, Oregon, shooting of December 12, 2014, comes just two days shy of the second anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut.

The syncs between the Aurora, the Clackamas, and the Sandy Hook shootings were strong. Most school shootings are traditionally seen as "white male students" killing their classmates or students at their former schools.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, when 20-year-old Adam Lanza fatally shot 20 children and 6 adult staff members. Prior to driving to the school, Lanza shot and killed his mother at their Newtown home. As first responders arrived at the scene, Lanza died by suicide by shooting himself in the head.

On December 11, 2012, a shooting occurred at the Clackamas Town Center in unincorporated Clackamas County, outside the city of Portland, Oregon. The gunman, 22-year-old Jacob Tyler Roberts, ran into the shopping center wearing tactical clothing and a hockey mask and opened fire on shoppers and employees with a stolen Bushmaster M4 Type Carbine. He fired a total of seventeen shots, killing two people and seriously wounding a third person before shooing himself, dying by suicide.

Did everyone really think that racism would disappear just because an AfricanAmerican was elected President?

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The media loves the simplistic phrase "school shooting" to whip up interest in their stories. The problem is, they don't exactly know what to do when the shootings involve non-whites.

In the fall of 2005, there was a nonfatal "school shooting" in Saginaw, Michigan. According to the media, a probable "gang-member" Clarence Russell III, 15, was accused of shooting fellow sophomore Daniel Foster, 15, October 20, near a stairwell inside Saginaw High School. Foster did not die of his injuries, and some speculation occurred that it was a "gang-related shooting" (translate this from the media as "African-American"*). Days later, on October 24, in a drive-by shooting, three teens were targeted, with two hit. The one teen who was not shot was the 17-year-old half brother of Clarence Russell III.

On October 10, 2007, Asa Coon (above), a 14-year-old student at SuccessTech Academy high school in Cleveland, Ohio shot four people, including two teachers and two students. Asa H. Coon was a Caucasian going to a predominantly AfricanAmerican school. His was a face and personality that was the different one in that enviornment. He was a "death Goth" Columbine copycat in a trenchcoat, according to some media accounts. His shooting resulted in only one death - his own when he turned the gun on himself.

In 2007, I made these observations:

I've written in recent years of the diverse and ethnic underpinnings that must be acknowledged in these school shootings, and the shifting trend from white rural to white suburban to more ethnicities taking on the mantle of Columbine, over and above their own cultural background. This school shooting cries out for further analysis on that level too.
The [Cleveland's] shooter had a name that hardly can be ignored, and must have been a burden to carry. "Coon" is an insulting term for a black person. "Coon" is known as a derogatory term for AfricanAmericans, and is similar to the n-word. Its origins are traced back to a shortened form of the word "raccoon," used in reference to the animal. The black eye masks and noctural habits of the animal paralleled the characteristics of typical robbers and thiefs. The stereotype was then applied to black people. It was used extensively in the South, but then followed blacks into the Northern urban areas where they settled.
This young man named Coon was a white student living alone with a Goth Columbine mentality among AfricanAmericans. He is said to have liked Marilyn Manson versus God. Allegedly, the fight that resulted in his suspension was related to an argument about his Devil worship. Simplistic ways to describe a life, I know, but that is what you get from the media after a shooting.

*"Gang-related" incorrectly means "black teens," to the media: 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" (Source: National Youth Gang Survey Trends From 1996 to 2000, 2002).

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Bloody Valentine's Day?

It is a full moon on February 14, 2014, from Albania to Sochi, from Alaska to Xinjiang. May everyone be safe on this Bloody Friday.

I have low expectations for humans on February 14th. The love and romance associated with Valentine's Day seem to turn into killings of different varieties. It is as if, of all the days during the year, this one brings forth the most tension for a few individuals.

Extend this to what has been occurring with homicidal-suicidal feelings recently, and the outcomes are tragic. School shootings, domestic violence in murder-suicide clusters, workplace violence, and more. Are mall shootings, church killings, terrorist attacks, and new domestic murder-suicides in our near future? Does Valentine's Day have an international reach? Will violence visit global locations on February 14th?

On February 14, 2008, six people were dead due to a Northern Illinois University shooting, including the gunman. There were 22 casualties in all.

Yesterday, I received a call from a reporter based in Montreal for the Globe and Mail newspaper. He discussed with me, as he described them, "a recent series of multiple murders involving rage-filled men killing their lovers or ex-lovers and their loved-ones. Three cases involving a total of about 10 deaths, in the space of about 2 weeks." 

I pointed out that Valentine's Day could be a day to watch out for and warn about in his article. Unfortunately, the reporter Les Perreaux felt the story won't get published until the weekend due to the fact there just had been a new murder-suicide, on Thursday, February 13th.

This topic hits close to home for me, and I've always acknowledged that. 

My book, The Copycat Effect, is dedicated to my maternal grandmother (pictured above), who died in a Valentine's Day murder-suicide.

I penned that dedication this way:

For Nellie Gray,

The grandmother I never knew,
as she was killed during a murder-suicide
on Valentine’s Day, 1940.

In my book I wrote an entire section entitled the "Significant of Dates," and began with one special example, St. Valentine's Day. I reprint below what you will find in my book about February 14th, from pages 246-247:

Dates are important, anniversary events especially so. Suicides, murder-suicides, murders tend to clump around dates of loss for at-risk victims.

One such date is one that most people assume should be associated with happy feelings, but it is not. That is Valentine’s Day. For many people, it’s a day that speaks more to emptiness and loss than to joy and love.

One cultural event seems to point to this feeling: the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” of February 14, 1929, in Chicago. On this day the alleged henchman of gangster “Scarface” Al Capone murdered seven members of the George “Bugs” Moran gang in a North Clark Street garage. Colorful names, a memorable day, the windy city, a grand crime, and huge headlines have made this event enormously “infamous” in history. Books and movies have fueled the copycat effect of this date.

A year after “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” Ben Hecht...authoredScarface(1930), which was made into a Howard Hughes produced, Howard Hawks directed movie (1932) about the North Clark Street killings. Hughes supposedly asked that Scarfacebe "realistic, as exciting, as grisly as possible." Censors blocked Scarfacefor two years before Hawks got it to theaters.

How does culture make a 1929 event into currency for a future generation? Through the movies and other media, of course. Some Like It Hot(1959) had Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis playing two Chicago musicians who witnessed the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and are forced to cross-dress as women in order to hide from Al Capone. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre(1967) starring Jason Robards portrays the event in docudrama style.

But beyond fiction, real murders and murder-suicides have also been linked to the specific Valentine’s Day 1929 gangland murders. The gangland and other ripples from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre certainly demonstrate an awareness of the twilight language of the event.

The individual most often identified as the organizer of the Moran gang killings was Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn, one of Capone's most trusted men. McGurn (whose real name was James DeMora), an expert with the Tommy gun who had an “eye for the ladies,” especially for blonde women, was killed on the eve of Valentine’s Day, 1936. A nickel was put in McGurn's right hand and, next to his body the killers left a humorous valentine card.

Sometimes personal histories reinforce the negative Valentine’s Day link. My grandmother was killed by her second husband on Valentine’s Day, 1940, in Illinois, in a murder-suicide, as my future mother, a 12 old girl, looked on in horror. The copycat effect sometimes hits close to home.

During the 1980s, St. Valentine’s Day was a focus of teen suicide clusters around the United States, and many families felt the impact of the day.

Earlier in the book, I described a teen suicide cluster in Peekskill, New York. I mentioned on February 4, 1984, Robert DeLaValliere, 13, hanged himself in Depew Park, and then I wrote:

Did another teen then imitate DeLaValliere? Ten days after his suicide, 14‑year‑old Justin Spoonhour picked a tree in back of his home and hanged himself. Spoonhour lived in Putnam Valley, five miles north of where DeLaValliere died. His mother graphically described in a People magazine article how she found her boy. "I turned my light on and saw Justin hanging from a tree,” she wrote. "His eyes and mouth were open, and his tongue was swollen and protruding." As we have noted, this was Valentine’s Day in Peekskill.

Elsewhere in The Copycat Effect, Valentine's Day figures as a touchstone for understanding the context of violence in which we find ourselves. I noted:

In 2002, National Review online editor Jonah Goldberg, a conservative, commented on liberal Senator Patrick Moynihan’s 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down,” to make some points about the media’s normalizing of terrorism. Goldberg’s and Moynihan’s insights apply here, in understanding how the media makes “celebrities” of events, which then serve as cultural icons that are held up for emulation by followers. In this way, copycats are produced. Calling the essay “one of the most influential articles of the last decade,” Goldberg notes that “Moynihan argued that deviancy - crime, mental illness, out-of-wedlock births, etc. -- had become so rampant, had so thoroughly soaked into the culture, that we simply had to redefine the abnormal as normal to cope.”

“Moynihan's most famous example was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre,” noted Goldberg. “That event was a major turning point in American history, credited with helping to convince Americans to abandon prohibition…The actual details? Four gangsters murdered seven gangsters. In the early 1990s, Moynihan noted, Los Angeles suffered from the equivalent of one St. Valentine's Day Massacre every weekend. And, of course, we can say much the same about suicide bombings in Israel.”

The above passages are from my 2004 book, The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines, a work the American media does not wish you to buy or read. In Canada, intriguingly, they are more open to research findings and the lessons learned.

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Moscow School Shooting

Headlines are using the phrase "hostage situation," but this event is a "school shooting," which had as a component the taking of hostages. 

As I've noted before, in one of first modern school shootings, the Moses Lake, Washington State incident, on Groundhog’s Day, 1996, Barry Loukaitis, 14, took his classroom hostage, killed two students and his algebra teacher.

Students of Moscow School #263 leave the building escorted by police on February 3, 2014 after an armed student took more than 20 teenagers hostage (Photo Credit: Dmitry Serebryakov)

CNN is reporting:

A Moscow high school student shot a teacher and a police officer dead and held about 20 other pupils hostage in a classroom Monday before he was disarmed and detained, Russian authorities said, just days before Russia hosts the Winter Olympics.
In a rare school shooting in Russia, the attacker entered his school in northern Moscow with a rifle and held students and a teacher hostage in a biology classroom, the Investigative Committee of Russia said.
The incident, at School No. 263, happened around noon local time when the armed student forced his way past a security guard, who raised an alarm.
"On his way to the class the shooter injured one of the teachers who died later," said the committee, Russia's federal intelligence agency. "The police officers arrived to the school. When they entered the building the shooter opened a gun fire, injured one and killed another."
All of the hostages were released and the gunman was detained, it added.
State media said there were about 20 students in the classroom.
The incident comes as Russia prepares to host the Winter Olympic Games, due to start in Sochi this week.

AFP said:

Witnesses said the suspect -- described as a 'straight-A' pupil named Sergei Gordeyev -- charged into the school wielding two rifles and ordered a security guard to lead him to a specific classroom in the two-story building on the northern outskirts of Moscow.

Russia 24 said the student is said to have had an issue with a geography teacher. This was not the teacher who was shot or who was among the hostages.

CNN also noted:

The media outlets said the student had a small-bore rifle and a hunting carbine, which were registered under his father's name.
They reported he is said to have fired 11 times. His father called him and spoke to him for 15 minutes to try to convince him to release his hostages. The father then went to the school and talked to the student in the classroom. Only then did he agree to release his hostages, state media said.
CNN could not immediately independently verify this.

The hostage scenario is infrequently a part of American school shootings, and is part of the Stephen King book Rage.

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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.”

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Masks, Holmes Lexilink + List of Victims

The complete list of the victims has been released.

The Mask

Humans wear all kinds of masks: psychological ones, somatic examples, acting facades, and of course, real physical structures called "masks."

On Friday, December 14, 2012, as I noted, there occurred the "Newtown School Shooting: Killing Dawn" event.

During an interview with a Sandy Hook school parent this Saturday morning, on the television news, this woman heard that a guy dressed in all black, wearing a mask, was shooting at the school on Friday.

Then a correspondent (TP), this AM, sent an article from the UK's Globe Mail, headlined, "High school loner to cold-blooded executioner: How 'genius' honor student Adam Lanza became masked killer."

The news item noted:

Lanza is believed to have shot himself at the scene, according to the New York Times. 

He was carrying three weapons including two handguns and a rifle and was wearing a bullet-proof vest, a mask and black military gear.

Three guns were found at the scene - a Glock and a Sig Sauer, both pistols - and a .223-caliber rifle. 

The rifle was recovered from the back of a car at the school. The two pistols were recovered from inside the school. They were legally registered to Nancy Lanza.

That article never truly followed up on their headline suggestion, for it fails to detail any description of a mask.

Update: Intriguingly, these "mask references" have been removed from the original Daily Mail article. But the "masked man" quotes remain in many sources. What's going on?

But, if Adam Lanza (Adam = English for "man," Lanza = Spanish for "spear") wore a mask, what did the mask look like?

The Holmes Lexilink

The July 20th/Aurora's alleged shooter is named James Eagan Holmes.

Today's New York Daily News had this quote:

Mother Nancy Lanza often took her kids target shooting, landscaper Dan Holmes said. 'That was a passion,' he said. 'The whole family would go together.' Her 20-year-old son Adam killed her with one of her own guns before using them to murder 20 children at the elementary school where she once worked....Holmes, who often mowed the grass at the Lanza’s sprawling Newtown home, said the doomed mom was proud of her arsenal and once showed him a “big, beautiful rifle” she had just purchased.

“She was very proud of it,” he said. “She loved her guns.” 

The Newtown Victims

Here is the complete list of victims released by the medical examiner's office (which does not include Nancy Lanza, 52, and Adam Lanza, 20). Most of those who died in the school, apparently and sadly, were killed with the .223 Remington Bushmaster (semi-automatic) rifle. New information notes that this Bushmaster was not found in Lanza's vehicle, but next to his body.

USA Today posted a gallery of photos of the victims. See here.

Children:

Charlotte Bacon, 6

Daniel Barden, 7

Olivia Engel, 6

Josephine Gay, 7

Ana Marquez-Greene, 6

Dylan Hockley, 6

Madeline Hsu, 6

Catherine Hubbard, 6

Chase Kowalski, 7

Jesse Lewis, 6

James Mattioli, 6

Grace McDonnell, 7

Emilie Parker, 6

Jack Pinto, 6

Noah Pozner, 6

Caroline Previdi, 6

Jessica Rekos, 6

Avielle Richman, 6

Benjamin Wheeler, 6

Allison Wyatt, 6

Adults:

Dawn Hochsprung, 47
Rachel Davino, 29
Anne Marie Murphy, 52
Lauren Rousseau, 30
Mary Sherlach, 56
Victoria Soto, 27

Clackamas Mask 

It will be recalled that the Clackamas mall-December 11th's alleged shooter, Jacob Tyler Roberts wore a hockey mask, also described by some as a "Jason mask."

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Colorado Clusters and Copycats

by Loren Coleman ©2012

Aurora did not happen in a vacuum. Media spin would have you believe that only two major incidents of mass violence have occurred in Colorado in recent years. Aurora is one. And the other is Columbine, which, of course, happened in nearby Littleton.

But such things are told to you by a few newspeople who have no sense of history. Or they wish to ignore the vortex that Colorado has become for acts of violence and mass manias. California gets all the bad press, but sometimes the reality of pain happens in Colorado.

Today, few remember that suicide clusters were the behavior contagion phenomena that spread like a wildfire across America beginning in the 1980s. One of the first clusters began when twelve teens killed themselves in the northern Denver, Colorado suburb of Loveland in 1980-1981. The word "suicide cluster" refers to a concentrated number of self-deaths occurring in a specific location in a short amount of time. Some in the media disputed the fact that "suicide clusters" actually existed. But Loveland was a classic suicide cluster that began to start appearing in news stories and documentaries, which attempted to acknowledge this supposedly "new" behavior by teenagers.

Movies and suicides were identified as being interwoven, and special studies were made of The Deer Hunter. Here again, Colorado cropped up. Philip J. Hinshaw, 22, of Boulder Colorado, killed himself acting out a scene from The Deer Hunter with a .38 caliber automatic in front of his cousin, noted the Rocky Mountain News on February 9, 1980. He died five months later. According to a January 20, 1982, news report on KMGH-TV, Paul Whittaker, 17, of Denver, Colorado, killed himself with a .22 caliber revolver while playing Russian roulette with his brother and two girls the day after The Deer Hunter was shown on broadcast television. Four other Russian roulette deaths occurred across the country within six days of this Colorado 1982 incident. The copycat effect was subtly occurring, linked to suicides, by professionals in the social sciences, like myself.

I ended up writing a book, Suicide Clusters in 1987, about how the phenomenon was not new - first records date to 4 BC Greece - and detailing how they were rather consistent in their appearances. I began to talk about the copycat effect, but most people only were relating it to suicides and murder-suicides in the 1980s. The copycatting of one suicide after another was seen to jump, via newspapers, news magazines, and marginal television media attention, from well-publicized events to smaller ripples.

The copycat effect became so predictable, however, and the media coverage of these events so thorough, that I began to observe them almost as they would occur, in realtime. For example, on Friday afternoon May 16, 1986, former police officer David Young and his wife Dorris took over the Cokeville (Wyoming) Elementary School, and held 167 students and teachers hostage. The siege ended when one of the Youngs' homemade gasoline bombs went off, burning scores of fleeing, screaming children. David Young apparently then killed Dorris, wounded teacher John Miller, and then turned his Colt .45 on himself. (Months later, it was revealed that several children reported seeing angels in the classroom that day, including many children who claimed to have seen a "beautiful lady" who told them to go near the window. Other children reported seeing an angel over each child's head. A police photo taken during the incident - above - also reportedly shows "angels.")

The nationally broadcast Cokeville hostage situation, turned murder-suicide, was followed by the killing that night of five people at a bar and nearby convenience store in Colorado Springs, Colorado. When cornered by police, the killer, plumber Gilbert Eugenio Archibeque, shot himself once in the head with his .237 caliber handgun at 2 A.M., Sunday morning, May 18, 1986.Throughout the 1980s, it was individual acts of suicides, with occasional outbursts of murder-suicide incidents that grabbed the media's attention. The clumping and repeating of these suicides in specific geographic areas, like Loveland, were noted by social scientists as suicide clusters.

Suicide clusters of the 1980s - with Loveland's being the first epicenter - would be replaced by the school shootings of the 1990s, almost all conducted by suicidal male youth. The copycat effect had merely shifted its target as the media had shifted its focus. School violence has been around for a long time. but America’s “first” modern school shooting took place on Groundhog’s Day, February 2, 1996, at a school at Moses Lake, Washington State.

The Moses Lake killings set the pattern for what would follow in America--a student (not an outsider) killing other students and teachers. This is the horror--the danger from within of students killing students--that appears to have captivated the media. On that day, Barry Loukaitis, 14, dressed all in black, with boots and a long coat that hid his father’s hunting rifle and two handguns, walked into his Frontier Junior High fifth-period algebra class at Moses Lake and started shooting. He has cut the pockets out of his long Western duster and was able to use the .30-.30 lever-action hunting rifle without taking his hands out of the long, black trenchcoat. Loukaitis killed two classmates (Arnold Fritz and Manuel Vela) and then severely wounded another (Natalie Hintz). Hintz, sitting beside the boys, was shot in the stomach, with the bullet traveling through her elbow and almost tearing her right arm off. Next, Loukaitis aimed at the back of his algebra teacher, Leona Caires, and killed her as she was writing an equation on the chalkboard. With the carnage around him and 15 students in the room crying hysterically, Loukaitis calmly turned toward them, smiled and said: “This sure beats algebra, doesn't it?” The line was a quote from the Stephen King novel, Rage. Physical education teacher Jon M. Lane then rushed into the room, knocked the rifle away from Loukaitis, and wrestled him to the floor to end the shooting.

Loukaitis said his murderous loss of control was inspired by King’s Rage, Pearl Jam's music video “Jeremy,” and the movies Natural Born Killers and The Basketball Diaries. Unfortunately, the explosive media attention to Loukaitis’ school shooting triggered a series of similar events. Today, Stephen King says he wishes he had never written Rage.

Then Columbine happened. On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, killed one teacher and 12 students and wounded 23 others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Centering their attack on the cafeteria, Harris and Klebold spoke German and worn trench coats, as they reenacted scenes from Matrix and The Basketball Diaries in the nation's deadliest school shooting. They had plotted for a year to kill at least 500 and blow up their school. At the end of their hour-long rampage, they turned their guns on themselves. Harris and Klebold appeared to have deliberately chosen the anniversary date of Hitler’s Birthday for their attack. At one point, Harris and Klebold had considered the highly important date of April 19, too – the anniversary of Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing – but transportation problems forced a delay in their plans. They finally carried out their attack on the 20th – speaking German and “honoring” Hitler. (They had also discussed that after the attack, they would hijack a jetliner, fly it from Colorado, and crash it into Manhattan. This was two years before the 9/11 terror of 2001.) In the wake of the shootings in Littleton, the nation’s schools were under attack by copycats. Some 450 related incidents were reported in the month following the Columbine killings.

The decades-long impact of Columbine copycats is well-documented today, and I captured that research in my 2004 book, The Copycat Effect.

But in 2006, another shift occurred. Before 2006, most of the school shootings involved students or former students firing on students and teachers, and ending the incidents with the shooters' death, suicide by cop, or capture, often when attempting suicide. But something changed, and once again, Colorado fostered a model that was to be repeated in copycat situations.

Before the Colorado milestone incident of 2006 occurred, the following shadowy Columbine copycats took place:

Wednesday, August 29, 2006 - Hillsborough, NC - one dead (father of teenage shooter) - two wounded (two students) - shooter showed up in a trench coat, with guns, pipe bombs, in a copycat of Columbine - Asked by police why he went to Orange High School, Alvaro Rafael Castillo, 19, responded: "Columbine. Remember Columbine."

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 - Montreal, Quebec - Based on the pattern I see behind this shooting, Quebec was a logical next location (near Vermont and French-linked). Kimveer Gill, the 25-year-old shooter, a self-described atheist Goth with an Indian Sikh heritage, wearing a trenchcoat, dark clothing, and a Mohawk haircut, came to Dawson College, fully armed. He appeared to target what students call the "Jew Caf" and opened fire, killing Anastasia de Sousa, 18, and wounded 19 other students. Police fired upon him, and then Gill turned the gun on himself. Gill was obsessed by the Columbine massacre. He mentioned online being a fan of several computer games (e.g. Super Columbine Massacre) and movies (e.g. Natural Born Killers, Matrix) with violent themes that have been played out in several school shootings.

Thursday, September 14, 2006 - Green Bay, Wisconsin - Matt Atkinson, a 17-year-old senior, told an associate principal at Green Bay East High School on the day after the Montreal college shooting that a Columbine-like plot was being planned by two teens. It was said to be a "suicide-by-cop" plot. Police arrested the boys and then found sawed-off shotguns, automatic weapons, pistols, ammunition, several bombs, bomb-making materials, camouflage clothing, helmets, gas masks, and suicide notes. Brown County District Attorney John Zakowski said: "This was a Columbine waiting to happen."

But then something different happened at Bailey, on the edge of Pike National Forest. On Wednesday, September 27, 2006, at Bailey, Colorado (39 miles from Columbine), a man named Duane R. Morrison, 54, (DOB July 23, 1953) walked into an English classroom at Platte Canyon High School, and took six young female students hostage. The media and local law enforcement officials conducted detailed press conferences as the drama unfolded, giving exact details about why they could not rush the building; the hostage taker had chained the doors.

After releasing four hostages, one at a time, the students told the police that sexual assaults were occurring. As the situation neared a 4 pm deadline and discussions broke down, a police SWAT team blew open the door to Room 206 with explosives. Morrison fired a handgun at entering SWAT officers, and then at 16-year old Emily Keyes, fatally wounding her. The gunman then killed himself. The last hostage was saved. (A suicide note from the shooter was found on September 28th.)

In the wake of Bailey, Colorado's former assistant attorney general Dave Kopel wrote a thoughtful column, "Kopel: Only Press Itself Can Stop Copycats" in the October 7, 2006 issue of the Rocky Mountain News. In that piece, he said, "In the 2004 book The Copycat Effect, Loren Coleman documents, in horrific detail, how the publicity about mass murders and suicides leads to more murders and suicides."

It is good to know someone was listening.

Nevertheless, the days that followed were filled with media reports giving in-depth details about what had transpired.

Then, on October 2, 2006, came the shooting in Amish country, the deadliest of that week's 2006 cluster, with five dead. I was quoted by Canadian media (who were not afraid to openly talk about the copycat effect in 2006) that I saw these violent shooter, intent on shocking the public, sometimes "compete for the highest body count."

In America, the copycat effect was downplayed, and often skeptically challenged.

Col. Jeffrey Miller, commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Police, held a widely reported news conference on October 3, 2007, the day after the Amish school shooting.

The public was looking for answers, of course. Miller wanted to communicate some, from his point of view. Many people clearly saw that the Amish attack bore similarities to a deadly school shooting on September 27, in Bailey, Colorado, in which police said an older white man (Duane R. Morrison) molested girls in a classroom before killing a 16-year-old and himself. But Miller said he believed the Pennsylvania attack was not a copycat crime. "I really believe this was about this individual and what was going on inside his head," Miller reportedly said.

The media detailing of the events in Bailey, however, I would point out, very definitely influenced the Nickel Mines shootings - including the over-identification between the shooters (both suicidal sexual molestors), the victims (little girls), the hostage situation (plans carried out), the use of the school (location of opportunity with girls), and the response to the police (which ends badly but with the shooter dead - a probable goal). Both also involved using chains on doors to keep the police out. The overlapping outrage between the sexual assault actions of Morrison in Colorado and the thoughts, feelings, and history of Roberts, the Amish killer, are too obvious to ignore. The eventual outcomes - suicidal thoughts being acted out in a horrible scenario of taking the lives of these young females and then ending the shooter's own through suicide (or if need be, via suicide-by-cop) - are the same.

The media, however, is always hostile to the "copycat effect" and so one spin on information shared by Col. Miller was done thusly:

Investigators also said that Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, plotted his takeover of the school for nearly a week and that the items he brought — including flexible plastic ties, eyebolts and lubricating jelly — suggest he may have been planning to sexually assault the Amish girls before police closed in.
"It's very possible that he intended to victimize these children in many ways prior to executing them and killing himself," State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller said. But Roberts "became disorganized when we arrived," and shot himself in the head.

But if you read on, you will see that it is not this simple:

Roberts had planned the attack for nearly a week, buying plastic ties from a hardware store on Sept. 26 and several other items less than an hour before entering the school, Miller said.

So the facts are that the plastic ties, which are produced for many reasons, would become "hostage restraints," were purchased the day before Bailey. Other items were purchased after the Bailey hostage-school shooting-suicide incident, up to Monday, October 2nd's Amish killings.

How do we know what Roberts was thinking? He tells his wife in his note that he had been struggling with thoughts about molesting girls again. Perhaps his internal demons were being stirred up? He bought plastic ties to do "something." Then the media's wall-to-wall coverage of the sexual assaults on the six young female hostages in Bailey, Colorado, gave Roberts the canvas to paint his horrible scenario. Yes, something snapped inside of Roberts. To say that Roberts was not influenced by Bailey seems to be a form of denial.

The Amish school shooting at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, was the 24th school shooting in the United States in 2006, according to the National School Safety and Security Services.

The model of what happened at Bailey and Nickel Mines would be repeated during the next shooting season - spring. On April 16, 2007, in a backpack, Seung-Hui Cho carried into Norris Hall at VA Tech, several chains, locks, a hammer, a knife, two handguns with nineteen 10- and 15-round magazines, and almost 400 rounds of ammunition. In the largest mass school shooting in America, he left 32 people dead, 17 wounded, and himself killed by suicide. What was one of the newest elements that the VA Tech killer brought to this mass shooting? It was those chains Cho used to lock out law enforcement officers trying to save the students. That was one of the copycat elements that lead straight back to Bailey, Colorado.

There have been other violence events coming out of Colorado. On December 9, 2007, at Colorado Springs, Colorado, three people are killed and five wounded in two shooting rampages, one at a missionary school in suburban Denver and one at a church in Colorado Springs. The gunman in the second incident is killed by a guard. On Monday, June 9, 2008, the Colorado media reported a teenager was arrested in Fort Collins, who was also allegedly linked to three attacks, including a stabbing at a Wal-Mart. Police arrested the 17-year-old at the Wal-Mart Supercenter at 1250 E. Magnolia Street, in Fort Collins, Colorado, after they reported a 20-year-old man, Frank McConnell, of Ault, was stabbed in his abdomen. Police believe the suspect may be the same person who assaulted another man and harassed a cyclist earlier in the day during a series of random attacks.

There was even a "workplace shooting" in Aurora's past. A former kitchen worker, Nathan Dunlap, 19, who had been fired, went on a shooting rampage at a family restaurant that left some of its employees dead. On December 14, 1993, his shooting spree left four Chuck E Cheese employees, Ben Grant, 17; Colleen O’Connor, 17; Sylvia Crowell, 19; and Margaret Kohlberg, 50, dead.

Colorado is more than Aurora and Columbine. More than Bailey and Loveland. It is a state with a good deal of history that has yet to be fully appreciated. 

The recent red dawn event of Aurora, I predict, will call forth an era of reflective recall, to look at the morrow in a new way.

No kids should see that kind of violence where 

Batman is killing as many people as the bad guys. 

~ Burt Ward

********************

For the links to recent other postings about The Dark Knight Rises, Colorado's Aurora red dawn event, and copycats, please see also:

Aurora Copycat Effect: The Complete List

Red Dawn Again

Aurora: Synchromystic Wonderland

Aurora Copycats: Prepare Now

Anticipating Aurora and Beyond

Red Dawn

Blood Red Movie Massacres

Joker Copycats: 2008-2112

Dark Knight Shooting: 12 Dead, 58 Injured

Bane/Bain Bursts Bare (Part 3)

Bane/Bain Continues (Part 2)

Bane/Bain (Part 1)

Recent interviews, about the Aurora shootings:

WGN - Mike McConnell: Loren Coleman

The Corbett Report: The Copycat Effect with Loren Coleman

Binnall of America: Loren Coleman and Bruce Rux

Talk Shoe - 42 Minutes: Loren Coleman

Red Ice Creations

The Copycat Effect

(NY: Simon and Schuster, 2004)

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