TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Boy slits girl’s throat in Montrose High lobby:

Yesterday at Montrose High School in Colorado a 14-year-old boy who does not attend the school walked right up to 16-year-old Mallory Haulman and slit her throat.

The suspect has been captured. He had just started at an ‘alternative school’. That’s just a fancy name for ’school for criminals’.

The suspect and the victim did not know each other. Ms. Haulman is said to be in serious condition but is expected to recover nicely.

Of course the suspect’s name has not been made public because he is a juvenile.

More on this as details become available and time allows.

Thanks to Steve Huff for the tip.

If you’re wondering where everything went don’t worry. I’m doing a massive redesign on the site and it may take me a while.

3 injured in Phoenix college shooting:

This hasn’t been getting a lot of mainstream coverage so you may not have heard about it but yesterday there was a shooting at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Arizona.

22-year-old Rodney Smith, the accused gunman, was a student at the school. He shot three people and one of them was the intended target. This was not a random shooting as police say that Smith had a grudge with one of the victims.

The victims include a 19-year-old Isaac Smith and a 20-year-old woman, who are both in critical condition, and a 17-year-old boy who is in stable condition.

Smith was arrested at his house along with his parents and three other people. They were charged with interfering with an investigation and failure to obey a police officer. The family that’s jailed together failed together.

It seems that the shooting stemmed from a fist fight that Smith lost to the 19-year-old male last year. Police say that the pair got into it again yesterday. Issac Smith ended up punching Rodney Smith then Rodney Smith responded by opening fire.

Typical coward with a gun.

Rarely am I offered the chance to review a stellar true crime book by a publisher. Usually it is a book I have chosen on my own, or something wretched sent to me by some hack publishing company. It is my great pleasure this time to bring you “Twisted Confessions” by Charles E. Skollar.

Mr. Skollar was the prosecuting attorney on the Kitty Genovese case in 1964 in Queens, New York. I know most of us have heard of that case, but I myself did not know a lot of the details. This book does not give a great deal of details about the case, it’s more about the emotional toll that the trial took on everyone involved.

To complicate things further, Mr. Skollar had prosecuted and convicted a young man (who had confessed) for the murder of Barbara Kralik, a rising high school junior also from Queens. After a suspect was arrested for the Genovese murder, this suspect also confessed to the Kralik murder and the murder of Annie Mae Johnson.

Mr. Skollar goes into great detail about the horrendous amount of work involved in trying to untangle one confession from another. I won’t go into detail about how he was finally able to do it. I strongly urge you to read the book for yourself and find out. You will not be disappointed.

Teen accused of planning Columbine-style attack at Penn sentenced:

Russell James Frantom IV was sentenced yesterday for his part in a plot to attack Penn High school in Indiana. He was told he could be held in juvenile detention until he’s 21. So I guess it wasn’t much of a sentence but more like a suggestion. Anyway he’ll be spending sometime in a “boy’s school”.

He apologized and said he would have never gone through with the plan. Uh-huh. That’s whay they all say.

Even his mom is happy with the sentence…

“I feel comfortable with the decision. I think he can go on and learn from his mistake and come out a stronger person and maybe a better person. That’s what i can hope for,” Kelly Stetler tells NewsCenter 16.

We can only hope.

No word if he’ll testify against his interstate cohort Lee Billi.

Newark man who threatened Columbine detective given probation:

So if some guy in his late 20’s from Ohio e-mailed threats to a police officer, claimed he knew a mass murderer, then claimed the mass murder was his idea what kind of sentence do you think he would get? You’d think he at least get a few years for violently threatening a cop right? Wrong!!!!

Patrick Gauchel threatened one of the Jefferson County Sheriffs who investigated Columbine and all he got was five years probation, a $750 fine, and has been banned from the internet for 5 years.

Add Judge Thomas Marcelain to the list of judges that must be on crack. At the very least this nutbag, Gauchel, should have sent to the squirrel factory for an extended stay.

Student gets reprieve for attack threat:

Previously I posted about how Arlington High plotting suspect Joseph Saia was given special treatment by a judge. Now a second suspect in the Arlington plot has basically been patted on the head by a judge.

16-year-old Patrick Quigley was told by a judge yesterday that he has been placed on interim probation and won’t be sentenced until next year and the judge agreed to remove Quigley’s monitoring device.

With all do respect Judge Thomas J. Dolan, you’re smoking crack.

“Consider this a trial run to see if you’re a fit candidate for probation,” Dolan told Quigley Monday during a five-minute proceeding in the county courthouse in the City of Poughkeepsie.

That’s an awfully dangerous gamble you’re taking there Judge Dolan.

Jonesboro shooter fit to stand trial:

Mitchell Johnson, he of the Jonesboro infamy, has been ruled competent to assist in his own defense for his upcoming theft trial. I don’t see why this was an issue since he was competent for his federal weapons trial.

His trial date has been set for October.

Court considers plot defendant’s mental health:

The world’s oldest mutant, 33-year-old Lee Billi of Ohio, is allegedly having defendant competency issues. That means that Billi may not be ruled mentally competent enough to help his own defense.

If you’ll recall Billi was involved in an interstate plot to commit school shootings with an Indiana teen at Penn High School. When investigators combed through his computer they also found an alleged cache of child porn.

If he’s mentally incompetent than lock him in a cell and tell him it’s camp.

Magazine reveals new details about NIU shooter:

Talk about dropping the other shoe. For months we heard nothing about NIU gunman Stephen Kazmierczak or what his motive was. Now Esquire magazine is saying something that should not surprise me in the least but yet it does.

I originally thought that Kazmierczak was just a victim of an undiagnosed mental problem but as it turns out he was something much more familiar.

According to Esquire Magazine while Kazmierczak did suffer from mental illness it also turns out that he was nothing more than a copycat of Virginia Tech shooter Cho Seung-Hui.

The story includes Kazmierczak’s fascination, chilling in retrospect, with Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech student who shot and killed 32 people before killing himself in April 2007.

“He was interested in what was going on in the mind of Cho, and why it was so successful, and how someone could do it, how they could pull it off,”‘ reporter David Vann writes, quoting a friend he identifies only as Kevin.

And his mental health history wasn’t exactly unknown either. Kazmierczak was drummed out of the Army after they discovered that he lied on his application about mental history. He held back about his history of suicide attempts, psychotic episodes, and hallucinations.

Just further proof that as a society we’re more concerned with the rights of the dangerously crazy than we are with the welfare of others.

Judge won’t budge in IM case:

Thomas Musetti was recently spared jail time for threats made against Upper Merion High School. He might be wishing he got the jail time because he’s been ordered back to a maximum security section of a mental health facility.

It seems that Musetti still wants to make-a-da-boom-boom and wrote about it in his secret public journal.

In a June 24 entry in his journal, Musetti wrote that he could not share the impulses he was having to make bombs and set them off “in heavily populated areas and places of travel” with his doctor for fear that his doctor “would obviously have to put me away. I don’t blame him. I would put me away, too.”

And so he was put away.

Grandma found the journal and turned it over to authorities along with bomb making plans that Musetti had downloaded off the internet. Did anybody see this coming? Oh that’s right, I did.

Musetti’s lawyer claims that this was just a ‘hiccup’ on his road to recovery. Sorry but that was more like a dry heave on his road to recovery.

Mother of attack plot teen to be evaluated:

The Mother of Dillon Cossey, Michele Cossey and the woman who supplied him with the guns, has been court ordered to undergo a psych eval. Michele Cossey’s attorney declined to say the reason he requested the evaluation. The prosecutors did not object to the defense’s request.

Personally I don’t think she’s crazy, she’s just a bad parent.

Belvidere High School attack plot suspect in jail on unrelated charges:

Our favorite beer and cough medicine mixing alleged school plotter is back in the news.

James Shipps was returned to a jail cell on charges unrelated to the plot against Belvidere High School in New Jersey.

Shipps was previously convicted of public drunkenness and being in a park after hours. He failed to pay the $1000 court fines and is now back in jail because of it.

Judge delays SC teen’s trial on explosives charges:

The trial for Ryan Schallenberger has been delayed because his attorneys have requested more time to prepare for trial.

Schallenberger was the teen who ordered ammonium nitrate through the mail in order to blow up Chesterfield High school in South Carolina.

I received an unconfirmed tip that those who stood around while Dakota DeRemus died are being charged. Two of the four witnesses may have been charged with unlawful assembly and battery and are supposedly scheduled to appear before a judge on July 15th.

I’ll try to bring you confirmation soon.

UPDATE 7/8/08: I have confirmed the information from the county’s website.