TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Category: School Violence

  • Carneal’s request for hearing denied

    Court rejects claims from Paducah school shooter:

    The Kentucky Supreme Court rejected a request from Paducah gunman Michael Carneal to have anew competency hearing. The now 25-year-old Carneal recently claimed, 11 years after the Paducah shootings, that at the time he shot up Heath High School he was mentally ill and that his lawyer was ineffective counsel at the time of his guilty plea

    Carneal argued that he was unable to reveal that he was hearing voices at the time of the shooting and guilty plea because of his mental illness. Justice Bill Cunningham, writing for the court, was unpersuaded, saying the claims rest solely on what Carneal says, not any outside evidence creating “a conceptual ‘Catch-22’.”

    It’s always nice to see that some judges still have common sense. Especially considering that the kids he killed, Nicole Hadley, Jessica James, and Kayce Steger, don’t have the luxury of appealing their death sentence.

    Carneal will be up for parole in 2023.

  • Paducah shooter now claims he heard voices

    Michael Carneal
    Michael Carneal

    High court hears arguments on Carneal’s competency:

    Michael Carneal was the then 15-year-old gunman who killed 3 and wounded 5 at Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997. At his trial, he pleaded guilty but mentally ill to the murder charges and was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole in 25 years.

    Of course, he claimed he was bullied but again as most cowards do he shot and killed innocent bystanders, a group of students who were in a prayer circle.

    Now it’s being argued in the Kentucky Supreme Court on whether or not Carneal was too mentally ill to plead guilty. Now, through the wonders of modern junk psychology, Carneal is claiming that at the time of the shooting he was schizophrenic and was hearing voices.

    The Kentucky Supreme court is expected to rule in three to six months.

  • More on E.O. Green shooting

    More on E.O. Green shooting

    A deadly clash of emotions before Oxnard shooting:

    This is an article from the L.A. Times that is very in-depth about the shooting at E.O. Green Junior High School in Oxnard, CA. 15-year-old Larry King was shot and killed by 14-year-old Brandon McInerney. King was openly gay and was tormented about by McInerney. To stand up for himself, King would mockingly flirt with McInerney when he was being bullied by him. This led to McInerney being teased for allegedly being gay, which he wasn’t. Because of this, McInerney shot and killed Larry King.

    What I despise about the article is that it makes McInerney out to be a victim also because he had a hard life. Larry King had a hard life and had the extra stigma of being gay in a middle school. But instead of turning to violence to defend himself, Larry King used his wits.

    The only victim here is Larry King.

  • Odgren’s lawyer wants indictment thrown out

    Odgren’s lawyer wants indictment thrown out

    Odgren attorney: Throw out first-degree murder indictment:

    Criminal defense attorneys never fail to amuse me. Take for instance the attorney to John Odgren, Jonathan Shapiro. Mr. Shapiro wants the first-degree murder indictment against his client because the prosecution did not instruct the grand jury properly as to Odgren’s mental and psychological conditions.

    For those of you just joining us, a then 16-year-old Odgren is accused of stabbing 15-year-old James Alenson to death in a bathroom at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. Alenson was allegedly chosen at random by Odgren. Odgren has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, which some think that Odgren was not responsible for his own actions. To which I say bullshit.

    Asperger’s does not cause someone to become randomly violent, and to claim such will only make people with Asperger’s outcast and reviled probably more than they already are. Asperger’s did not make John Odgren plan this murder months in advance. Asperger’s did not put the knife into John Odgren’s hand.

    So, in my unprofessional opinion, I think the prosecution absolutely did the right thing by not disclosing his alleged mental deficiencies to the grand jury. To do so would be almost criminal.

  • Dillon Cossey tipster arrested

    Dillon Cossey tipster arrested

    Strange Twist In Foiled Montco ‘Plot-To-Kill’:

    Remember how the kid who turned Dillon Cossey in was heralded as a hero? Well, not so much anymore. It seems that he’s a little criminal in his own right.

    That teen and two of his friends were arrested for breaking into the Cossey’s home.

    Does this mean Dillon Cossey is innocent, not on your life? Just because the kid who turned him in is also a criminal, it doesn’t mean that his testimony wasn’t accurate. Not to mention all the other corroborating evidence in that case.

    But I guess it’s true what they say. There really is no honor among thieves.

  • Red Lake families sue consulting firm

    Red Lake families sue consulting firm

    Consultant sued over Red Lake shootings:

    Families of the victims of the Red Lake shooting are suing a consulting firm whose job it was to provide the school with a contingency plan in case of such crises. Obviously, their contingency plan didn’t work.

    The families are suing MacNeil Environmental Inc. stating that their security plan didn’t work.

    The lawyers say they have received strong expert opinion on their claims that MacNeil’s plan was confusing, poorly formatted and contained conflicting directions for school staff.

    Normally, I’m against families of school shooting victims suing 3rd parties, but this lawsuit actually sounds like it does have merit.

    Previously, the families had sued the Red Lake School District and were awarded $900K between the families.

  • NIU shooter was on Ambien

    NIU shooter was on Ambien

    Girlfriend: Shooter was taking cocktail of 3 drugs:

    Remember when I said that Stephen Kazmierczak meds had nothing to do with the shooting? I stand corrected…sort of.

    It turns out that Kazmierczak was on three drugs, Prozac, Xanax, and Ambien. Prozac is an anti-depressant, which, as I stated before, should have still been in his system at the time that he stopped taking it. Xanax is an anti-anxiety drug, kind of like Valium. I’ve been prescribed Xanax before. After taking one of those, the only thing I wanted to do was sleep, so I don’t think it was the Xanax. Ambien is a drug that is supposed to help you sleep. In a lot of cases, it does the exact opposite at best.

    A few years ago, there was a member of my family who was prescribed Ambien for sleep. Whenever they took an Ambien to try to sleep, they would end up being awake for hours in a stupor-like state. It got to the point where I didn’t want to be around them when they were on Ambien, and I was worried about their own safety. Luckily, when I expressed my concerns, they realized what Ambien was doing to them and stopped taking it. In my personal opinion, I think Ambien is a danger and should be taken off the market.

    There have been instances where people arrested for car accidents have claimed that they were on Ambien and didn’t even remember that they were driving. Can I draw the conclusion that Ambien caused Kazmierczak to on his killing spree? Logically, no. Only by anecdotal evidence would I try to make that conclusion. However, I don’t think it should be ruled out.

  • NIU shooting and the media

    NIU shooting and the media

    Northern Illinois shooting goes unnoticed:

    This is an op-ed piece from the San Jose State student newspaper about how the national media has treated the NIU shooting, and how it’s basically ignored the story since it happened.

    People reacted in horror when Seung-Hui Cho attacked Virginia Tech University last April, and grief gripped the nation for several days. Compare that with Thursday, when people didn’t even bat an eye when Steven Kazmierczak committed a similar crime at Northern Illinois University. It felt like a bad horror movie we had seen before.

    Some took note, a few grieved and a lot just didn’t notice.

    Only five days after the event, the NIU shooting and the issues surrounding it were less significant to CNN than satellites being shot down and Bill Clinton picking on a heckler. By contrast, the shooting at Virginia Tech filled our media’s consciousness for at least a week.

    I hate to say it, but the truth hurts sometimes. Ever since Columbine, it’s been all about body count as far as the media is concerned. At Columbine, 13 were killed. At Virginia Tech, 32 were killed. At NIU, just 5 were killed. I think it also had something to do with the fact that, as far as we know so far, Stephen Kazmierczak wasn’t an attention-seeking douchebag like Cho, Harris, and Klebold. Go down the list of categories on my site and tell me how many of the shootings you’ve heard of.

    This is where I like to think that this is where this site serves its purpose. When one of these incidents unfortunately happens, I post about it from start to finish.

  • NIU gunman covered his tracks

    NIU gunman covered his tracks

    Gunman Hid His Tracks, Officials Say:

    It seems that The Times is on a roll lately.

    Anyway, this is an article about how NIU gunman Stephen Kazmierczak covered his tracks prior to the shooting.

    The hard drive from his computer and the SIM card from his cell phone are both missing. I think this lends credence to my theory about Kazmierczak possibly being a paranoid schizophrenic.

    This wasn’t the typical school shooting either because as of, yet there’s no evidence that Kazmierczak craved any kind of attention like that of Cho Seung-Hui or Kimveer Gill.

    I think this is just a tragic incident of an undiagnosed mental illness.

  • Meds played little to no role in NIU shooting

    Meds played little to no role in NIU shooting

    Reports of Gunman’s Use of Antidepressant Renew Debate Over Side Effects:

    This is a great article from the NY Times (which is rare) about what kind of role antidepressants played in the NIU tragedy.

    In a word, they probably played no role whatsoever.

    Kazmierczak was on Prozac and was off of it for three days prior to the shooting. According to the article, Prozac doesn’t leave your system in that time.

    Now, the anti-depressant Luddites will still use this as an argument because they can’t make up their minds if being on or off antidepressants causes situations like this.

    Most medical professionals quoted in the article say that when patients on antidepressants have violent outbursts like this, it usually indicates another underlying problem.

    And I’m sure they’ll also ignore this quote.

    Dr. Michael Stone, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia, maintains a database of 1,000 violent crimes, including mass murders, going back decades. In many cases the accused had stopped taking drugs for schizophrenia, Dr. Stone said.

    “I only have a handful of cases,” he added, “where the person was on an antidepressant.”

    I wouldn’t be surprised if Kazmierczak had undiagnosed schizophrenia.

    Personally, I couldn’t laud the benefits of antidepressants enough. Being on one has literally saved my life.