TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Tag: school shooting

  • More from Platte Canyon

    Gunman, hostage die:

    Some additional details have emerged about the siege at Platte Canyon High School in Colorado that left the gunman and a hostage dead…

    Authorities did not release the name of the victim, but friends of the family said she was 16-year-old Emily Keyes. Lynn Bigham, a friend of the victim’s, described Emily as “sweet and affectionate.”

    The man, wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt and carrying a backpack, entered the school at 11:40 a.m., apparently looking for someone specific, according to witnesses, although police would not confirm that.

    He entered Sandra Smith’s honors English class and fired a shot in the air, then told all the students to stand facing the chalkboard, said Tom Grigg, whose son, Cassidy, was in the classroom.

    Then, the gunman approached each boy in the class and told them to get out.

    “A guy came up and pointed a gun at (Cassidy) and told him to leave,” Grigg said. “He said, ‘No, I want to stay with the girls,’ and the guy put the gun in his face and said, ‘You. Out of here.”‘

    Police would not say whether the gunman sexually assaulted any of the girls. But Grigg said his son told him, “There were some really bad things that happened in that classroom.” He did not elaborate.

    The gunman had shielded himself with one of the two girls, the sheriff said. He declined to say whether deputies fired any shots in the classroom.

    As usual, the guy with the gun is a coward.

  • Hostage dies from injuries

    Gunman, hostage dead after high school siege:

    The female teenage hostage at the Platte Canyon High School siege has died from her injuries…

    A girl who was shot by the gunman died about 4:30 p.m. (6:30 p.m. ET) at the hospital after a helicopter transported her there, said Bev Lilly, a spokeswoman for St. Anthony Central Hospital in Denver.

    Police said earlier they believed the girl was 16. She was shot as police stormed the room where the gunman was holding hostages, police said. The gunman then shot himself.

    My thoughts and prayers go out to the friends and family of the victim.

  • Hostage crisis over

    Hostage situation over:

    The hostage situation at Platte Canyon High School in Colorado has ended. One student was critically injured and the adult gunman took his own life…

    The gunman was cornered with the girls in a second-floor classroom and he released four of them, one by one. Park County Sheriff Fred Wegener said authorities decided to enter the school after the man cut off negotiations and set a 4 p.m. deadline. At the time, he was still holed up with two girls.

    “It was then decided that a tactical solution needed to be done in an effort to save the two hostages,” the sheriff said, his voice breaking. “Entry was made. The suspect shot one of the hostages, then shot himself.”

    The remaining hostage was unharmed and talking with authorities. The sheriff said the gunman threatened the girls virtually throughout the four-hour ordeal, at one point fired a shot within the classroom and shielded himself with his hostages.

    The suspect was not identified and the sheriff was at a loss to explain a motive.

    “I don’t know why he wanted to do this,” Wegener said.

    Students described the suspect as a bearded man toting a camouflage backpack and the sheriff confirmed that: “He did have a backpack and said he would set it off.” The man was also toting a handgun.

  • Parenting, what a concept

    The Return of the School Shooting:

    This is an opinion piece from Blogger News Network about school shootings which also come to the most logical conclusion about them…

    However, I think it’s important to note that kids getting picked on doesn’t explain the totality of the issue. Something had to make school shootings start in the first place in the mid-to-late ’90s — bullying has been going on for ages — and analyses of Columbine showed the shooters did not concentrate on those who’d picked on them, opting instead for “Doom”-style random violence.

    My preferred explanation — one that ruffles feathers — is parenting. Many of these kids had plenty of time alone in their houses (Harris and Klebold made pipe bombs), and in most cases I can recall, the parents could easily have afforded quitting one job or working fewer hours. It’s also a parent’s job to monitor his/her children’s mental health issues, and keep guns away from the offspring if need be.

    I think it’s the only explanation that stands up to scrutiny, as it’s one of the few explanations that changed markedly between my parents attending high school in the ’70s (much bullying, lots of access to guns, no shootings) and now. Other factors can make it wax and wane, but as long as parents let a violent media raise their kids, the shootings won’t disappear.

    I’m glad to see that I’m not going crazy by having the same opinion.

  • Blame only one

    Kimveer Gill — perhaps he was just evil:

    Kimveer Gill is not society’s victim:

    The first article is from a right-wing Canadian website. Wait, there are right-wingers in Canada? Just kidding Canucks. And the second article is from Kimveer Gill’s high school English teacher. Both articles are along the same lines.

    First from the right-wing article. While I don’t agree necessarily with how they got their point across I do agree with their point…

    More importantly, Kimveer Gill will never be blamed for the actions of Kimveer Gill. The notion that Gill was just an evil man and that he and not the gun registry, violent video games and the Goth culture were responsible for the carnage will be rejected by the masses as being too simplistic; too George Bush-like. In a society where many people can’t recognize the evil of Islamofascism, it is too much to expect people to recognize the evil of what was once Kimveer Gill.

    In the end, all that was responsible for the actions of Kimveer Gill was Kimveer Gill.

    And now the article from Gill’s teacher, one Ms. Freda Lewkowicz…

    But the litany of blame omitted someone, and there’s only one person who should be blamed for Kimveer Gill’s school rampage on Sept. 14.

    Only one angel of death can dance on the head of this pin of sorrow and that is Kimveer Gill.

    He is responsible for shooting 20 students and killing 18-year-old Anastasia De Sousa. He should not be permitted to become a victim.

    It’s great to see that some people still actually believe in personal responsibility.

  • Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare

    Gun control won’t protect us from the losers:

    This is actually an article about Canadian gun control but I couldn’t resist these quotes…

    Here he is again, the loser with a grudge and a gun slithering up from the basement of a middle-class home where he fermented his immaturity, anger and resentments to full and deadly potency “interacting” with like creatures on the Internet.

    His mom says he was “a good son.”

    The neighbours’ comments — the banality of this would be screamingly funny were it not for the horror of the event — amount to this: He was quiet and kept to himself.

    Aren’t they always.

    His resentment and anger are perfectly understandable.

    He’s a loser and losers spend their lives being angry and resentful.

    It’s one of the reasons they’re losers. Life is something that happens to them. They aren’t something that happens to life.

    They aren’t achievers.

    Worst of all, he knows he’s a loser, but failing the courage or will to do something about it and actually change, he decides to write his name in the pages of our times with gunfire, and paint a final statement with the innocent blood of students — young people working toward successful futures.

    His victims are everything he is not.

    The ultimate proof he’s a loser: His final statement, his final moments in life are desperately unoriginal. Just another loser in a long list of losers. The perpetrators of Columbine and Taber and all the others.

    He was 25 years old.

    Who among us is still so much an angry adolescent at 25?

    He’s a loser baby, and somebody killed him.

    Don’t be a loser.

  • More on Kimveer Gill posting here

    Postings sympathized with school shooters:

    This is nothing that I haven’t already posted about. Just an interview I did with the Montreal Gazette about Kimveer Gill leaving comments on my site.

  • Kimveer Gill’s former classmates speak

    A killer’s dark mind:

    Kimveer Gill’s high school classmates paint a different picture of him than the one we know…

    Former high school classmates described him as normal — “nothing out of the ordinary, just a regular high school kid,” said Anthony Proce, who, like Gill, graduated from Rosemere High School in 1998.

    Friends said he never dated in high school.

    Mr. Proce and others said, far from the impression the six-foot tall Gill left on his Web site, he wasn’t the victim of bullying.

    “He wasn’t a guy that got picked on, not at all — who picks on a tall, big guy who could kick your ass if you picked on him?” said Dennis Pavia, another classmate who now plays drums for heavy metal band Diecast.

    “He didn’t dress like a rapper or a Goth or anything like that, more like jeans, T-shirts and sneakers,” said Mr. Pavia, who said he usually saw Gill every day at school but wasn’t close to him. “I remember Kimveer just being a friendly guy, always smiling. However he came to do something like [the shootings at Dawson] I wouldn’t say is because of high school.”

    Alex Hullar, another former classmate, said he was shocked when he heard Gill’s name on the radio yesterday.

    “He was a pretty calm, relaxed guy,” he remembered. “He had at least eight close friends and they always hung around together in high school. They were all very good students, very good grades.”

    He said Gill dressed normally, “never a trench coat and all that kind of stuff. I don’t know where that came about.”

    He said he had not been in touch with Gill since graduation.”It’s going to be one hell of a high school reunion, I can imagine,” he added.

    Gill left few other marks. His graduation yearbook had a blank entry beside his photo.

    So he wasn’t bullied in high school. If he was bullied after that it’s because he allowed it to happen. How many more nails in the coffin does the bullying myth need?

    Thanks to CC for the link.

  • A view inside Gill’s mind

    Blogs reveal a deteriorating mind, police say:

    This article states that not only did Kimveer Gill keep a written journal but he also scouted Dawson College prior to the shooting. But first, let me get this out of the way…

    But his online musings do not refer specifically to Dawson or his violent plans. However, he repeatedly emphasized that people planning a crime would be stupid to outline their agenda on the Internet.

    The comments, made on a Livejournal site called The Trenchcoat over a number of months, included references to various school shootings in the United States and caused him to be banned from writing on the site.

    In one, he defends the young people who were charged after a school shooting plot in Riverton, Kan.

    “They wern’t [sic] going to do it for real,” Gill wrote. “They’re just kids having a little fun. If they were really going to do this, they would not be posting messages on MySpace and telling people in their school about it.”

    You can see what they’re talking about here. I do crosspost at LiveJournal but all comments are only on this site. Now back to the matter at hand…

    Kimveer Gill did not restrict his violent thoughts to the blog he kept on VampireFreaks.com. He posted disturbing comments on other Web sites and allegedly jotted them down in a diary, where the entries indicate his mind was deteriorating.

    Police investigators found the journal either at the scene of the shooting at Dawson College on Wednesday or while executing a search warrant at his parent’s home in the Fabreville district of Laval.

    “From what he wrote, you could tell that he basically hated humanity as a whole. He hated everybody. He hated black people, white people, rich people. He hated everybody,” a police source said.

    “It was very obvious his state of mind was deteriorating greatly over the last three weeks.”

    But the documents reportedly offer no indication as to why Gill chose to carry out a shooting rampage at Dawson College, killing 18-year-old student Anastasia DeSousa and wounding several other victims.

    TVA reported last night that security cameras on the nearby Alexis Nihon Plaza captured Gill scouting out the scene of his attack on Aug. 10, a month before his rampage. Police are viewing the tapes.

    So it seems that he did not “snap” like so many people are saying. When someone snaps the reaction is immediate. Gill was nothing more than a cold-blooded, calculating killer.

  • Police confirm that Kimveer Gill took the coward’s way out

    Police confirm gunman took his own life after being shot in the arm:

    I’m not surprised…

    MONTREAL — Kimveer Gill’s lethal rampage at Dawson College ended when he shot himself, provincial police confirmed Thursday.

    A preliminary autopsy indicates Gill, 25, was wounded in the arm, “likely by a police bullet,” but then shot himself to death, said Const. Chantal Mackels.

    Investigators have turned up no links between Gill, who was unemployed, and the school.

    “To my knowledge he was not a student (at Dawson) and had not been in the past. We don’t know yet why he did this at Dawson. That has to be answered,” said Lieut. Francois Dore of the Quebec provincial police, which is handling only the part of the investigation that involves Gill’s death. (By law, a police force in Quebec is not permitted to investigate a fatality that has occurred during one of its own operations.)

    Gill had no criminal record and had never been found to have a mental health problem, police say.

    A coward and a loser until the end.