TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Tag: school shooting

Castillo e-mailed Columbine principal

Authorities: NC school shooting suspect e-mailed Columbine principal:

Ok, this Alvaro Castillo guy just made himself king mutant…

(Hillsborough, NC-AP) August 31, 2006 – Authorities say the 19-year-old man accused of killing his father and then injuring two students during a shooting at Orange High School in North Carolina sent an e-mail to the Columbine High School principal warning of his attack.

The message was sent Wednesday morning by Alvaro Castillo to Columbine principal Frank DeAngelis. It read: “Dear Principal, In a few hours you will probably hear about a school shooting in North Carolina. I am responsible for it. I remember Columbine. It is time the world remembered it. I am sorry. Goodbye.”

He almost seems like the John Mark Karr of the mutant set, except that Castillo actually killed someone.

August 31, 2006
Color me shocked (More on Alvaro Rafael Castillo)

Teen in Shooting Obsessed With Columbine:

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I read the headline. Well, more like a sledgehammer. I knew my guess about Alvaro Rafael Castillo being a mutant would be correct…

A teenager accused of killing his father and then shooting two students at his former high school said Thursday that he had been obsessed for years with the mass killing at Columbine High School.

Alvaro Rafael Castillo mentioned that massacre as he arrived for an initial appearance in Orange County District Court. When asked why he fixated on the 1999 attack, Castillo said he didn’t know.

The 19-year-old was assigned a lawyer at his first court appearance and ordered held without bond. He didn’t speak during the brief hearing and only nodded when asked by Judge Charles Anderson if he understood the proceedings.

That last paragraph kind of surprised me. I thought Castillo would be crazy enough to go off on some rant while in court.

I found this mildly interesting…

The owner of the property on which the Castillo home is located refused to allow reporters access to the private road on Wednesday evening. The home is located amid a mix of horse farms, trailer parks and modest homes.

I wonder which one he lived in.

August 31, 2006
More details on Alvaro Rafael Castillo

Teen charged with first-degree murder:

Even more details in the murder of Rafael Huezo Castillo and the Orange High School shooting in Hillsborough, NC by Alvaro Rafael Castillo…

The first reports of what happened early Wednesday afternoon at Orange High School summoned a modern nightmare:

A trench-coat-clad teenager with guns and pipe bombs, shots fired, students hurt.

Asked why he had gone to Orange High School on Wednesday, Castillo, a former student, responded, “Columbine. Remember Columbine,” AP reported.

And we have status on one of the victims at the school…

About 1 p.m., an armed man “flew” past the parking lot’s guard house in a gray minivan and fired about eight shots, said Anne D’Annunzio, an Orange County Schools spokeswoman.

Two students were injured, neither seriously. Senior Tiffaney Utsman’s right shoulder was grazed by a bullet. An unidentified male student was hurt by broken glass, D’Annunzio said.

Utsman had been released from a hospital by Wednesday evening, said her mother, Champe Revis. “My feeling about Tiffaney is absolute relief that she really was not hurt at all,” Revis said.

Details of the shooting at the school…

Courtney Long, a senior, said she was outside when she saw a man jump from a minivan wearing a black hat, black trench coat, black sunglasses and a white T-shirt. He set off a long line of firecrackers, she said, sending up smoke. She said he fired at car tires, then at a school window, sending a bullet through the glass.

From a patio outside, senior Scott Cook heard an explosion and turned to see a man standing amid smoke in the parking lot.

“He pulled out a gun. … He fired in the air, then he aimed it toward the school. At that time, I high-tailed it out of there and ran into the building,” Cook said.

At the Orange High School parking lot, deputies found ammunition, weapons and homemade pipe bombs in the van. The Durham County Sheriff’s Office bomb squad removed the bombs.

I saw the video of the little bastard on my local news today. He literally is batshit crazy because he was smiling like he just won the lottery as they put him in the police car.

Castillo is due in court today.

August 31, 2006
More on Orange High School shooting

Former student charged with killing father:

The suspect in the Orange High School shooting in Hillsborough, North Carolina also killed his father…

Alvaro Rafael Castillo, 19, of Hillsborough has been charged with first-degree murder in the death of his father Rafael Huezo Castillo following Wednesday’s shocking school shooting at Orange High School.

“Sacrifice, it’s all sacrifice.” Castillo said when asked why he murdered his father and shot at Orange High students. “We all have to die for the world is cruel.”

Orange County Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass said the younger Castillo confessed to killing his father after deputies arrested him for firing on his former high school.

After the confession, deputies moved on the information. They forced their way inside of the Castillos’ home on Lipps Lane near the Durham County line. Inside, they found the boy’s father shot to death.

When asked about his father, Castillo said, “He made us suffer all his life. Someone had to put him out of his misery. He abused me and my family. He was abused, too.”

Castillo’s mutant ranking is way off the scale, too…

As he was being forced into a police car, Castillo shouted out, “Columbine! Remember Columbine! Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold! Nathan Leopold, it’s his birthday! Sacrifice!” As the car was driving away, Castillo made his hand into the shape of a gun, put two fingers that were simulating a barrel into his mouth and then acted like he was shooting.

It should be noted that August 30, 1971, is actually the day Nathan Leopold died – not his birthday. Leopold and Richard Loeb gained notoriety in 1924 after they murdered a 14-year-old boy. The two University of Chicago students believed they were so smart they could pull off the perfect crime.

Since he’s obviously a deranged mutant, I wonder what the alleged abuse actually was.

August 31, 2006
School Shooting in North Carolina

Two injured in school shooting:

HILLSBOROUGH, N.C. — One person was shot and two people were injured Wednesday after a shooting at Orange High School.

Officials say a man fired approximately eight shots in the high school parking lot, hitting one female student in the shoulder. Another male student was injured by flying glass.

The gunman is now in custody. Officials said he sped past the high school’s security gate in a light gray minivan before opening fire. The gunman was a former student.

Two guns were seen lying on the parking lot pavement outside of the minivan after the shooting. One appears to be a shotgun. The other is a rifle and might possibly be an assault rifle missing its ammunition clip.

Deputies with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department locked down the school when they arrived. They weren’t letting anyone either in or out. They finally started busing students out of the school around 3:30 p.m.

As soon as I have more details I’ll let you know.

August 30, 2006
No real justice in Roseburg

Shooter gets 10 years, while victim and his family get life sentence:

This is a great article about a real victim in a school shooting. The one who is actually shot. Not these cowards with guns who have delusions that they were wronged somehow…

The gavel came down in the Roseburg courtroom a few weeks ago. Fifteen-year-old Vincent Leodoro will spend the next 10 years in custody for trying to kill 16-year-old Joe Monti at Roseburg High School last February.

Sentence pronounced. Justice done.

Well, no. Not in this society. Not unless you think saddling Joe Monti’s mother, Yvonne Allison, with crushing debt is justice. Yvonne says Joe’s medical bills from the shooting are about $2 million.

Did I mention Yvonne is a single mom who does not work outside the home because she is a full-time caregiver for two disabled sons, whose fathers are dead? Yvonne used to have only one disabled son until Joe was shot four times by an angry high school freshman, who used a semi-automatic pistol with hollow-point bullets.

“He currently has no feeling in his right foot, so he shuffles,” Yvonne says. “He also has many fragments of bullets in his back they were unable to remove.” Joe’s entire life may be affected by the nature of his injuries. “He asked why this happened to him. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Joseph. I don’t know.’ “

Yvonne was at home on the small ranch outside Roseburg, early Feb. 23. Her oldest son, Eric, 35, owns the ranch and lets Yvonne live there. For years Yvonne has been caregiver for her son Justin, who’s 23.

“He was born with neurofibromatosis,” she says. Sometimes wrongly called the “Elephant Man disease,” it’s an incurable genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow. “His eye was removed when he was 6. By 8 he’d had a craniotomy. . . . He also has brain cancer, but it’s in remission.”

Yvonne is angry that news accounts after the shooting appeared to blame Joe, always mentioning a minor school bus incident he had been involved in. “Joe is not a bully,” she says. (In fact, Vince told police he had not been a victim of bullying.) “But the reports made it sound like this was all Joe’s fault, and it wasn’t in any way. It was the fault of an insecure, immature 14-year-old boy who had access to deadly weapons.”

No matter how many reconstructive surgeries he endures, Joseph will never be the same strong boy he was the morning he was shot. He may never regain feeling in his right foot and be able to walk normally.

And Yvonne cannot imagine how she ever will pay the enormous debt she now owes. She had no medical insurance when Joseph was shot; she could not afford payments. And she had not enrolled the family in the Oregon Health Plan because she was only living in Oregon part-time because Justin’s doctors all are in California.

And that’s only part of the article. I defy someone to tell me that the gunmen in these school shootings are victims.

July 30, 2006
More on the Red Lake lawsuit

‘No amount of money will bring them back’:

Some more interesting lawyer-related details about the Red Lake lawsuit…

The deal ends the district’s financial liability for the shootings because state law caps legal claims against school districts at $1 million.

But families and survivors could sue other parties. Attorneys representing the 27 people involved in the school settlement said they are looking at their options.

“Our investigation into the circumstances of the shooting continues as we speak,” said Minneapolis attorney Philip Sieff, who represented 14 people in the settlement. “This is the end of the families’ claims against the Red Lake School District but not the end of their claims in general over the shooting.”

Who the hell else can they possibly sue? Jeff Weise’s father is dead, and his mother is severely disabled. The Jourdain’s? The gun manufacturers?

The settlement includes families of the five students killed and the seven students injured, and one student who was in the line of fire. It also includes five surviving school workers, the families of the two slain school employees and a relative of the grandfather’s companion.

I can see a settlement for those who died or were wounded, but there seems to be a lot of extraneous people involved in this lawsuit.

The Ambulance Chasers are killing personal responsibility in this country.

July 21, 2006
Red Lake lawsuit settled

Families settle lawsuit over Red Lake shootings:

MINNEAPOLIS – Families of victims in last year’s shootings on the Red Lake Indian Reservation have settled a lawsuit against the school district for $1 million.

The settlement was to be distributed among 21 families of shooting victims.

In Philip Sieff, an attorney for the victims’ families, called the settlement “best for everyone because it provides these highly deserving families some compensation for their losses and allows the School District to return all of its focus to education.”

Personally, I don’t see why the school district was sued. They had metal detectors and they had an armed security guard. Granted, neither of those steps stopped Jeff Weise, but what else was the school supposed to do? Not only that, but now you’re taking money away from the school that’s supposed to educate your children.

What does this accomplish?

July 20, 2006
Zero Day

Last night, I watched the movie Zero Day. For those of you who haven’t heard of Zero Day, it’s about a fictitious school shooting filmed from the point of view of the shooters much like what Harris and Klebold did with their basement tapes.

As far as movies about school shootings go, Zero Day is the best. It is much more interesting than the crap fest that is Elephant, and much more realistic than Home Room. In my opinion, the director tried to make it like Columbine without it actually being Columbine.

What at first I didn’t like about the movie turns out makes the movie better and more disturbing. In the actual basement tapes, you can see the anger and hatred in Harris and Klebold. In Zero Day, the actors were much more subdued about the whole thing.

My only complaint about the film isn’t with the film itself, it’s the fact that the mutants look at this as almost a “fan film” when I’m pretty sure that this was not the film’s intent.

Anyway, I won’t spoil any more of it, but I highly recommend that anybody, especially those with kids still in school, to watch this movie.

July 19, 2006
Newman’s sentencing appeal denied

Judge says teenager in shooting should receive house arrest:

The appeal for the ridiculously light sentence Pine Middle School shooter James Scott Newman received has been denied…

A judge on Friday agreed that a 14-year-old Pine Middle School student who shot a classmate should be sentenced to house arrest.

Prosecutors challenged Court Master Janet Schmuck’s May ruling involving James Newman, who said he brought his father’s gun to school March 14 because he was sick of being made fun of.

But Washoe District Family Court Judge Frances Doherty sided with Schmuck’s ruling, dismissing claims that Schmuck abused her discretion.

Washoe County District Attorney Richard Gammick had called Schmuck’s ruling “crazy,” and during Friday’s hearing, Deputy District Attorney Jo Lee Wickes said Schmuck’s decision did not consider public safety.

Wickes added that Newman would benefit more from being incarcerated because he would have more education, socialization and recreation opportunities.

Newman’s attorney, David Houston, said the boy is doing well on house arrest and that psychiatrists deemed him a low risk to commit similar violent offenses.

Houston said the prosecutor’s claim that Schmuck abused her discretion was based on “societal revenge” because he was not incarcerated for a crime that sent fear through the school and the community.

Schmuck has said she struggled with the sentencing and wanted to give Newman and his family a chance to “make it work.”

Schmuck ordered that Newman and his family undergo counseling, that all weapons be removed from their home and that he complete 200 hours of community service.

Newman also cannot get a driver’s license until 90 days after his 16th birthday and can’t get a hunting license for two years.

Justice in Reno is not only blind, it’s also brain-damaged.

July 15, 2006