While various other sources are claiming that Cho Seung-Hui practiced his assault prior to the Virginia Tech massacre, police are saying different.
“It would be speculation to suggest that he was practicing locking the doors,” State Police Superintendent Col. Steve Flaherty said in the first update on the investigation in months.
“Why West Ambler-Johnston? Why Emily Hilscher? We don’t know,” Virginia Tech Police Chief Wendell Flinchum said. Hilscher was one of Cho’s first victims, shot to death in her West Ambler-Johnston dormitory.
Since the dormitory was locked early that morning, “we believe Cho waited for some unsuspecting individual to walk in or out of West Ambler-Johnston and then took the opportunity to enter the dorm,” Flinchum said.
Investigators have not found the hard drive to Cho’s computers, Flaherty said. Video Watch new details on shooting investigation »
“That’s a piece of evidence we would love to find, along with his cell phone and possibly some other documents,” he said.
This is why I think the state panel looking into what happened at Virginia Tech is a joke. At the end of the investigation, they’ll have as many answers as the rest of us. None.
The Colorado Bureau of Investigation has released their final report on the shooting at Platte Canyon High School. It turns out that gunman Duane Morrison was more disturbed than anyone ever thought.
The basics are that Morrison was alleged to have been abused by his father, who told him that Morrison’s birth was due to an affair. Morrison was allegedly obsessed with pornography and phone sex, running up huge phone bills. More than likely, because of the phone bills, he was sought after by bill collectors.
He told a girlfriend he was impotent due to medication but asked her to go to a strip club and porno store with him.
Morrison allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with a 17-year-old girl who worked for the Morrison family’s haunted house. The teen denies the allegations.
After the siege at Platte Canyon, there were sexual devices found in Morrison’s backpack.
Even at the age of 53, Morrison was in fear of his father due to the alleged abuse he suffered.
Morrison also had an obsession with guns. One of the guns that he used at Platte Canyon High he claimed was stolen so he could collect insurance money.
Now before anyone starts feeling sorry for this assclown, don’t. He brought all his issues upon himself. There comes a time in a man’s life that he needs to stop living in fear of his father, and 53 is way past that time.
Emily Keyes is dead, and other girls were molested because this selfish scumbag couldn’t handle life’s responsibilities.
He’ll get no sympathy here, and he shouldn’t get it anywhere else.
Ten months after the trial of Tobin Kerns officially ended, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has finally ruled on the law that held up Tobins’ verdict.
In a key victory for Plymouth prosecutors, the state’s high court outlined today how a new law aimed at terrorist conspiracies should apply to two teenagers charged with plotting a Columbine-style attack on Marshfield High School in 2004.
In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Judicial Court said the law was crafted to punish people who discuss violent attacks on public places or against individuals. The SJC said for someone to be convicted, prosecutors do not have to prove that the intended target somehow learns about the attack. The court said prosecutors cannot use evidence from co-conspirators to prove their case, but can draw on witnesses who learned about the threats. Today’s ruling is believed to be the first time the SJC provided guidance to judges on how to interpret the five-year-old statute.
I hate to say it, but this does not bode well for Tobin. If any silver lining can be found in this black cloud is this ruling will apply to Joe Nee as well.
No word yet when the judge will deliver Tobin’s verdict.
Speaking of Kip Kinkel because you know we were, he has been denied a new trial.
Kinkel claimed he was too mentally ill to agree to a plea bargain that sent him to prison for more than 111 years. But the judge disagreed.
Kinkel argued his original defense attorneys and the trial judge should have ordered a mental competency evaluation before going ahead with the plea bargain.
But a lawyer for the attorney general’s office argued during a two-day hearing in June that Kinkel understood what was happening and was intelligent enough to calculate that his best chance for a reduced sentence was the plea deal.
Thank God for a responsible judge for once.
(Trench’s Note: I had this written up early yesterday but took the night off. Still, thanks to D.P. for thinking of me. 🙂 )
The last we heard anything about the shooting at Foss High in Washington State, gunman Douglas S. Chanthabouly was ordered to undergo a psych exam.
A psychiatrist there reported last month that the teen suffers from psychosis, and prescribed a battery of drugs to treat it, according to court documents.
So a judge has ruled that Chanthabouly is fit to stand trial.
Of course, his defense team will still more than likely be pursuing an insanity defense.
A psychiatrist hired by the defense has diagnosed Chanthabouly with a “major mental disorder,” John McNeish, one of the two public defenders assigned to represent the teenager, told Superior Court Judge Ronald Culpepper during a hearing.
McNeish did not say from what mental disease his client suffers or what the possible mental defense would be.
They haven’t picked out their mental disease yet.
To successfully argue insanity, his lawyers would have to convince a judge that Chanthabouly didn’t know the difference between right or wrong or couldn’t perceive the nature and quality of what he was doing when Kok was shot.
Eric Hainstock has been sentenced to life behind bars with the possibility of parole in 30 years for the shooting death of Weston Schools principal John Klang.
Judge Patrick Taggart said that he considered Hainstock’s age and background before sentencing. He said that he believes the teen can be rehabilitated, WISC-TV reported.
Defense attorneys had requested parole eligibility after 20 years while the state had requested 49 years with the date of eligibility being Sept.29, 2056 — or 50 years after the shooting at Weston Schools, WISC-TV reported.
The jurors who convicted Hainstock said that they focused on the guns and ammunition that he brought to school and the number of shots fired in determining his intent to murder.
Juror Brian Ludolph, of Prairie du Sac, said on Friday the fact numerous shots were fired by Hainstock convinced them the student intended to kill Klang. Ludolph said that Hainstock bringing the guns and ammunition to school also played into their finding of intent.
Juror Diana Mielke, of North Freedom, said that the jury was initially split on whether Hainstock intended to kill Klang.
Mielke said that she was initially among the six who thought Hainstock didn’t have intent to kill, but changed her mind after recalling Hainstock’s lack of emotion during the trial.
Thankfully, there was a jury with common sense who recognized Hainstock’s intent and weren’t fooled by his lies.
Justice has been served.
While you’re at WISC’s website, take the poll and let them know how you feel about the verdict and sentence. You can probably guess how I voted.
Not only was Eric Hainstock found guilty in the shooting death of principal John Klang, he was also convicted on the first-degree intentional homicide charge. He’s looking at life in prison.
Here we go. Now we get to see how rough poor widdle Eric Hainstock had it.
On the morning of the shooting, Hainstock testified, he awoke feeling tired of being picked on at school and said to himself, “I have to get all of this to stop.”
At school, he was stuffed into lockers, had his head dunked into toilets and was called a “fag” by his classmates, he said. As a result of the bullying, he attempted suicide three times.
His classmates’ comments “cut a little deeper,” he said, because at the age of 6, he was sexually molested by his 12-year-old stepbrother. He kept the alleged assaults a secret, he said.
Hainstock’s father, Shawn Hainstock, cried as his son testified.
Wait a minute. I thought his father was an abusive ogre who didn’t care about his son.
When he came home from school, Hainstock said, his parents forced him to do most of the housework. When he failed to do so, he was disciplined.
Hainstock testified that his father often kicked him and also used a wooden board called “the board of education” to spank him.
He said his father also refused to provide him with medication to help curb his attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Yeah, like that. If they were as poor as everyone is making them out to be, they more than likely would have been eligible for government assistance, where the medication would have cost them next to nothing. Not to mention the fact that ADD and ADHD are probably the most misdiagnosed and over-diagnosed conditions of the modern medical age, in my opinion. And which one is it that makes the kids go crazy? Is it being on meds or not being on meds? I forget, since I’ve seen both used as criminal defenses.
After loading his father’s 20-gauge shotgun and .22-caliber revolver, he drove to school, hoping he could force Klang to listen to his problems, he said.
Again, no reason to load the guns if his intent was to scare, which it wasn’t. Not only that, but what made him think that taking two guns to school to threaten people with wasn’t going to land him in jail. Did he think that miraculously all his problems would disappear and there would be no repercussions to his actions? What a dumbass.
When he entered the school, he screamed, “Everyone get in the office. I’m not f—ing kidding!”
He said he didn’t get flustered when the school’s maintenance man, David Thompson, was able to grab the shotgun out of his hand. Hainstock said he reacted by pulling the handgun out of his pants.
That sounds strangely like the characteristics of a cold-blooded killer to me. He’s lucky that Mr. Thompson didn’t blow him away right then and there.
When Klang turned the corner, Hainstock testified, he pointed the gun at him and said, “I ain’t going to do nothing … let’s go to the office, I want to talk.”
Hainstock said Klang agreed to talk to him in his office, but as they walked there, Klang grabbed him and the gun went off accidentally.
“The gun was caught in the clothing of my arm and when he pulled my arm it went off,” Hainstock testified.
He said he then aimed the gun at Klang’s arm and fired “so he would let go of him.”
After an accidental third shot fired, Hainstock said he was in shock.
“I didn’t think Mr. Klang was going to die … I hoped not,” Hainstock said. “I didn’t plan to hurt nobody.”
“The gun was caught in the clothing of my arm and when he pulled my arm it went off,” How in the hell would he have to be holding the gun for that to possibly happen?
The last witness to testify was Hainstock’s grandmother, Irene Hainstock, who said Eric called her from jail after his arrest.
“What have you done,” she recalled asking her grandson. “I don’t know, grandma. Something snapped in my head,” was the response.
Some more students…
Other defense witnesses included five students at Weston who saw Eric enter the school with a shotgun and saw it taken away from him. None remembered hearing him say, “I’m here to (expletive) kill somebody,” as one witness recalled.
On cross-examination, however, most said they weren’t sure they could hear everything that was being said that day.
Now let’s hear from Hainstock himself…
In his own testimony, Hainstock said he brought the shotgun and pistol to the school to make people listen to him and did not intend to kill Klang.
Hainstock said he needed the weapons — a 20-gauge shotgun and a .22-caliber revolver — “because they would be scared,” he said, referring to people at the school. “If they were scared they’d listen, hopefully.”
Hainstock, 16, testified unemotionally as the first witness in the defense case after prosecutors rested their case Wednesday morning.
Mounting frustration with his home life and with persistent taunting at school led him to the desperate action, he said, which he said was not intended to hurt anyone.
But after Klang grabbed him from behind at the school, Hainstock testified, the gun went off.
“It was accidental,” he said. He heard a grunt from Klang, he said, who continued to hold him. Hainstock said a second shot, which struck Klang on the side of the head but did not penetrate his skull, was intended for Klang’s arm, to get Klang to let go of him.
Hainstock said he underestimated the lethal power of the .22.
“I didn’t think it would hurt nobody that bad because it was so little,” he said.
I don’t buy any of it. According to this article, when asked by his attorney why Hainstock loaded the weapons he said it was “just a reaction.” Loading two separate weapons is not a reaction. That’s intent. And what did he think the .22 would do? Just bounce off people? And what if the shotgun was not taken from him. Did he think that a shotgun “wouldn’t hurt nobody?”
Anything less than a conviction of first-degree murder is a travesty of justice.
The videotaped statement that Eric Hainstock gave to investigators was shown to the jury yesterday.
The video, filmed just hours after the Sept. 29 shooting, shows Hainstock slouched in a Sauk County Sheriff’s Department interview room with Klang’s blood on his clothes. He tells detectives that he complained to Klang for three years about kids teasing him and calling him a “fag,” but that Klang did nothing to stop them.
That morning after his parents left their home, he says in the video, he “was still ticked off” at various students and the principal.
According to the criminal complaint, Hainstock, then a 15-year-old freshman, went to school outside Cazenovia, about 65 miles northwest of Madison, with a shotgun and a revolver.
A janitor tore the shotgun away, and Hainstock pulled out the revolver, cocked it and got ready to fire, he tells detectives in the video.
Hainstock was well-trained in firearms. You don’t cock the hammer on a gun unless you have full intentions of using it.
He says Klang came toward him and asked him, ‘What’s going on?’”
“I’m like, ‘I’m sick of you guys,’” he says in the interview.
He ordered Klang into an office, and as they turned to walk there, Klang jumped him, Hainstock says. He stuck his pistol under Klang’s left armpit and fired three times, he says. Klang later died.
“I just freaked out,” Hainstock says.
Yet multiple witnesses have testified that they heard Hainstock say he was there to kill someone. To me, cocking the gun definitely shows intent. If he wanted to scare someone, he could have just pointed an empty gun at them. But no, Hainstock went in there with two different loaded weapons with multiple rounds available for reloading.
He was planning on a massacre. He didn’t freak out. He probably realized that when John Klang went for his gun that it was probably the only chance he was going to get for revenge. John Klang probably saved a lot of lives that fateful day.
