No gun found in Red Lake High School:
A search of Red Lake High School found no weapons, and the school is safe for students to return next week, Red Lake public safety director Pat Mills said today.
That is all.
Blog
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No Gun Found At Red Lake
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Harris House Sold
Parents of Columbine killer sell home:
A little bit less than a year ago, I did an entry about the house of Eric Harris was up for sale. Well, the house has been finally sold.
What I found funny about the article is that it states that realtors did not have to reveal that Eric Harris lived there, or that he stored his guns and bombs there before launching the Columbine massacre.
Yet, the article mentions the name of the people who bought the house. If they didn’t know before, I’m sure they know now. I was hoping someone would bulldoze the house after they bought it, but I guess that’s not going to happen.
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Search for Gun at Red Lake
FBI: Gun Search At Red Lake High School:
Again, I’ll just quote…
A healing ceremony was postponed and Monday’s planned start of classes at Red Lake High School was in doubt after the FBI announced it was searching for a gun at the school.
“We have uncorroborated intelligence about the possibility of a gun on the premises of Red Lake High School,” FBI spokesman Paul McCabe said Thursday. Federal agents and Red Lake police were searching the school, he said.
What struck me as odd was that on Monday, when class reopens, armed security guards will be present. I realize this may be necessary, but it seems like a case of closing the barn door after the horses are out.
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20 Plotters Downplayed
’20 plotters’ comment played down:
Just going to quote here…
The top federal prosecutor in Minnesota says a Red Lake tribal police officer’s claim that as many has 20 students may have known about Jeff Weise’s plan to go on a killing spree at the reservation’s high school was “opinion,” and he refused to endorse it.
U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger in Minneapolis pointed out that the comment, made during a school board meeting last week, came from a policeman whose department is not conducting the investigation into the March 21 shootings.
Even if 20 people didn’t know about the plot in advance, if more than one person knew and didn’t do anything to stop it, it’s too many.
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Tin Foil Press
I originally wanted to call this entry something less culturally sensitive, but I was talked out of it.
Anyway, this article is from the New York Press, which calls itself New York’s premiere alternative newspaper. That translates into a hippy rag. Rather than let Jeff Weise be responsible for his own actions, the “author” of this article lays the blame squarely on the evil white man. Read the whole article, but I’ll give you a little taste…
The goal of this cover-up is to place all blame for the massacre on Jeff Weise’s evil shoulders. Thus, every major news organization repeatedly describes Weise as a Nazi, a gore-obsessed goth who once gelled his hair into the shape of horns.
The Nazi claim is the craziest of all. The obvious contradiction—Weise is a Native American, a child of one of the world’s greatest Holocausts—is lost on the very culture that committed that Holocaust. Weise was acutely aware of his people’s Holocaust, and he explicitly linked his rage and his urge to massacre to America’s moral hypocrisy.
It is easy to imagine that Weise connected his personal misery to the larger misery of his people.
Ok, smart guy, let me ask you a question. If Jeff Weise was so outraged by the horrible treatment of his people, then why did he kill not only a member of his own bloodline but also other residents of his own reservation?
Get back to me when you unwrap yourself from your tin foil cocoon protecting you from your imagined white man conspiracy.
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Victims Recovering
Wounded Red Lake teen’s first words: ‘I’m hungry’:
(Log in info) Some good news out of Red Lake. The two kids who were most seriously injured at Red Lake High School seem to be improving.
First Steven Cobenais…
For the first time in more than two weeks, Red Lake High School shooting victim Steven Cobenais was able to speak to his parents Monday.
The words, spoken from his intensive-care bed just after his breathing tube was removed, could have come from any teenage at almost any time.
“I’m hungry,” he uttered.
MeritCare neurosurgeon Alex Mendez said Tuesday that he had wondered if Cobenais would ever get to this point.
“This kid’s going to die on me,” is what Mendez recalled thinking when he first saw Cobenais’ CT scan revealing a brain riddled with bullet fragments.
Cobenais, who was shot in the forehead and has lost his left eye, is now in serious condition. He has made miracles out of mundane tasks, such as squeezing a hand when asked to and talking in short sentences, Mendez said.
And he eats Jell-O.
No small feat when doctors are concerned about your ability to swallow. There are still the rehab and health hazards to guard against, but Cobenais is off on the right foot, Mendez said.
“This isn’t just a scientific miracle,” Mendez said. “We’ve done just the basics. … There’s something more here.”
And Jeffrey May…
May, who is recovering from a gunshot to his face and a stroke, was moved from the intensive care unit Friday and upgraded to guarded condition.
Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers.
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The Unintentionally Funny Lawyer
Osantowski’s attorney wants charges dropped:
My favorite attorney turned unintentional comedian is in the news again. Andrew Osantowski’s lawyer, Brian Legghio, is now trying to say that the plot Andrew Osantowski spoke to Ceilia Ginty about is protected as free speech. I think the Founding Fathers just rolled in their collective graves when I typed that. Again. I say let’s go to the chat transcript…
on judgment day ill prolly kill him, my mom, my sistyer, my autisitc brother and my 3 cats
bring a gun to school, ur on the front of every newspaper
didnt choose this life, but i damn well chose to exit it
i cant imagine going through life without killing a few people
Now, of course, Mr. Osantowski is free to say those things. However, what he is not free from is the repercussions from his own actions.
I don’t know if Mr. Legghio is trying to be funny, but he sure gives me a chuckle. On the other hand, Assistant Macomb County Prosecutor Steven Kaplan lays out the facts…
“We don’t have to prove he would have done it or he had the ability,” Kaplan said. “The communication itself is the crime. We can prove he had the motive and the wherewithal to commit carnage at the high schools. He had hundreds of rounds of ammunition.”
So what Mr. Legghio is saying that the threats made by Andrew Osantowski were protected as free speech; therefore, authorities should not have acted on those threats, which may have culminated in the senseless bloodshed of students and staff at Osantowski’s school.
Makes perfect sense to me. Assclown.
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Blaming the music begins
Violence-themed rap promoter denies role in inspiring Red Lake shootings:
(Log in info) Ok. I’ll admit that it looks like I missed the boat on this development out of Red Lake. It turns out that Jeff Weise did, in fact, listen to rap. Specifically, two rappers named Mars and Prozak. This is ironic considering that Jeff Weise would pick fights with people who listened to rap and posted on Nazi message boards about his hatred of people who listen to rap. So not only was he a bully and a racist but he was also a hypocrite.
Of course, some media outlets are trying to draw a link between the shooting and the rapper Mars. According to the article, Mars belongs to a genre of rap called Horrorcore. Now I’m not an authority on rap, but I guess Horrorcore is the rap equivalent of death metal.
All I can say is, here we go again. In the 80s, they blamed suicide on metal. In the 90s they blamed gang violence on rap and Columbine on Rammstein and Marilyn Manson.
Now, unfortunately, some people are trying to pin the blame on Mars. Mars himself has, in my opinion, handled himself admirably well by distancing himself from the situation responsibly and intelligently…
“I write a lot of crazy lyrics, but there’s something wrong about anyone who blurs the line between reality and entertainment,” said a San Francisco-based rapper who calls himself Mars. “Maybe it inspired him, but no one knows what was going on in Jeff Weise’s mind.”
“A lot of people who post on my website are a bunch of crazy kids,” he said. “They write about suicide, murder, guns. But to get to a place where you do something, you have to be kind of crazy, pretty warped as a person.”
Mars doesn’t believe his music shares any responsibility for Weise’s actions. “Stuff like this is going to happen,” he said. “My responsibility as an artist is not to change my lyrics to something soft and poppy. What about teachers, principals, and parents? They had some responsibility, and they’re the ones who could have saved this kid.”
Michigan rapper Prozak had similar words to say…
“Yes, it is extremely violent, but you can go to Blockbuster and rent a comedy or a musical or an extremely violent horror film,” he told Newhouse News Service. “You can find violence everywhere, but every time there’s a tragedy involving a teen, it becomes a witch hunt against rap.”
I disagree that it becomes a witch hunt against rap, but it usually does become a witch hunt against some form of music.
Of course, we have some busybody group that disagrees…
That misses the point, said David Walsh, who heads the Minneapolis-based National Institute on Media and the Family.
“No, he’s not responsible for what this kid did, but it’s disingenuous to say that, when one of his goals while performing is to alter his listeners’ mood,” Walsh said. “When you take a vulnerable kid like Jeffrey Weise who already was a walking list of risk factors and then immerses himself in violent media, it’s literally stoking a fire.”
Consumption of violent media doesn’t directly “cause” violent actions such as school shootings, Walsh said, “but we know that media affect kids by amplifying feelings that are already there.
“Violent visual media does create aggression, while music is more an amplifier than a creator for angry kids.”
This guy kills me. In one breath, he says Mars isn’t responsible, but in the next, he says he was “stoking a fire”. So what are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to eliminate all images and references of violence from our society? In that case, you better get ready to ban the news, history books, and the Bible.
Again, it’s good to see Mars and Prozak taking the high road on the ridiculous accusations, unlike another alleged “rapper” that I can think of.
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20 People
As many as 20 teens knew plot of Red Lake shooting:
According to law enforcement officials, as many as 20 students may have had prior knowledge of the attack on Red Lake High School.
The FBI believes that as many as four students were directly involved in planning the attack.
The FBI seized anywhere from 30 to 40 of the school’s computers for analysis.
If this is true, then that’s way too many people who could have done something to stop this but didn’t. However, I guess the extent of their knowledge of the attack remains to be seen.
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Loner No More
Red Lake Shooter, Alleged Accomplice Were Members Of Clique Called ‘The Darkers’:
Well, well, well. It turns out that Jeff Weise wasn’t the loner that everyone has made him out to be. It turns out that Weise, the recently arrested Louis Jourdain, and three others were part of a clique that called themselves “The Darkers”…
The crew wore black clothes, listened to heavy metal and dyed or spiked their hair, with Weise opting for devil’s horns in his school picture from last year. Though initial reports painted Weise as a lone wolf whose life was lived mainly online with a group of confidants that included Nazi sympathizers and fellow fans of dark fiction, students told the Star-Tribune that Jourdain and Weise constantly hung out together.
Red Lake junior Rick Barrett told the paper that the Darkers shunned students who listened to rap and country music, and that Weise tried to pick a fight with him last year over Barrett’s fondness for hip-hop.
Doesn’t sound too much like Weise was the one being bullied now, does it?
Jourdain allegedly also recognized Weise as the shooter before anyone else…
An eyewitness told MTV News that before anyone knew Weise was attacking the school, Jourdain shouted out his friend’s name and ran toward Weise.
“At first he pushed over the librarian’s desk and he was like ‘F— … Jeff, it’s Jeff!’ and he ran out,” said Joe Good, 17, of Jourdain’s reaction to the sound of gunfire. Good also mentioned that another male student, who was hiding in the library when the rampage began, shouted out Weise’s name before anyone had seen him. That teen’s name has come up in a number of postings from Weise on various Web sites, according to the Pioneer Press.
It also seems that Jourdain isn’t the good kid that everyone is making him out to be…
The son of Red Lake tribe leader Floyd “Buck” Jourdain reportedly helped plan the deadly attack that claimed 10 lives on March 21, including that of 16-year-old shooter Weise. According to the Star-Tribune, the two boys exchanged numerous e-mails and instant messages beginning last year describing their plot to murder Weise’s grandfather — a police officer — steal his guns and use them to kill people at Red Lake High School.
An unidentified source told the paper that Jourdain even said at one point that he would be angry if the shooting spree happened without him.
Emphasis mine.
The article also states that three other teens who are suspected of discussing the plot with Weise have been questioned and could also face charges. I can only assume they are the three other members of “The Darkers”.
Curiouser and curiouser.