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.
Tag: trench reynolds
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Kimveer Gill was here
I was going back over Steve Huff’s entry on Kimveer Gill seeing what comments he was getting. Steve had updated his entry and I read something that made my heart drop…
UPDATE, 5:52 p.m. EDT
Kimveer Gill, as you might expect, didn’t just start aping the style and mannerisms of past psychos like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. He probably had been going down the deadly road he was on for quite some time.
To my surprise, I found posts by Gill (and at this point, for all I know, others have already found these as well — this story promises to be very heavily covered by everyone because the guy had an online journal) on the Usenet.
Gill used the Yahoo address rogue_warrior_50@yahoo.ca, and in November of 2005, he posted to this newsgroup: http://groups.google.com/group/aps-global-solutions/.
I knew that e-mail address well. rogue_warrior_50@yahoo.ca had left comments on this very site. I understand that you’re skeptical. I would be, too. Let me provide some photographic proof for you. This is a picture of my blog’s control panel…
He went by the name Rogue and left the following comments…
On an entry about Christopher Penley, the Florida teen who was shot and killed at his school for brandishing a pellet gun at police, entitled “Was lethal force justified?” Gill left this comment…
The police used extreme force. It’s completely unacceptable. The Rebel was moving the gun in all directions, very fast. He didn’t once point, steady, stance and aim it. He was just swinging it around. And everyone knows you can’t kill someone like that, if you’re moving it around, at the sky, and whatever. No shots were fired by the young Rebel, he didn’t even hurt anyone.
That cop is a coward. He was attacked earlier in his life. And ever since that he has become paranoid, and scared. Like a girl after she gets raped. Afraid of everything and everyone. The police had been told earlier that it wasn’t even a real gun. They didn’t even mention that on T.V.
The police kill another innocent person
This comment was left on an entry about a high school murder plot…
I don’t understand what’s wrong with this country. Two schoolgirls were playing around, joking if you will, and now they’re going to go to jail, just for a joke.
When I was in High School people would say they were going to kill each other all the time, no one got in trouble.
Why have the masses on this earth turned into cowards?
Where are the warriorsThis comment on an entry about a teen who made a threat that he was going to use a pitchfork in a school attack…
A student at school makes a joke, and the police spend all their resources to stop him. “A little joke”
The young lad was just letting off some steam. Give him a break. Come on, where’s your sense of humour?
Nobody goes on a killing spree with a pitchfork.
The country is full of child molesters, priests, rapists, and child molesting priests. Can we perhaps take them off the streets before spending all law enforcement resources on a teenager’s prank.
You people make me sick
This comment on an entry about a Florida teen that threatened to shoot up his school…
Poor Christopher
He did nothing wrong
Commit no crimeAnd now they’ve sent him to prison
It’s just not right
Well at least we can rest easy that this young lad will be free and back to his old tricks in a few short monthsHere’s hopin’
This comment on an entry about a teen from Michigan who got in trouble for printing out a bomb threat on his school computer…
I can’t believe the school would over-react like that. Children at school can’t even joke around anymore. And for the police to go along with this, I mean, come on…..this is shocking.
They’re slowly turning the country into a police state
My friends and I have said things like that at when we were still in school, and we never thought we would go to jail for it. I don’t understand what kind of society this is. I thought we had freedom of speech.
IT’S JUST A JOKE PEOPLE, DAMN…..
This comment on my first post about the Riverton, Kansas school shooting plot…
I had a feeling someone was going to try to do something like this on the 20th of this month. The cops got it all wrong. They wern’t going to do it for real. They’re just kids having a little fun. I hope the pigs don’t actually give them a fine or 2 weeks in jail, cuz’ that would be an injustice.
If they were really going to do this, they would not be posting messages on MySpace and telling people in their school about it.
I can’t believe the police have nothing better to do than waste tax payers money on stuff like this. I mean come on now……Boys will be boys
This comment on an entry about a threat made by a student that he claimed was a joke…
Why would the student face disciplinary action?
It’s just a joke……we’re sending our kids to jail, and ruining their lives over silly childhood pranks
The governments really going over board here
It’s time to take the power back
This comment on an entry about a Washington State teen who was arrested for planning his own school shooting plot…
How can the police arrest this young rebel, and send him to jail? He hasn’t done anything wrong. Many teenagers feel isolated and alone, and for such a reason they may create an imaginary reality within their own mind, such as shooting people.
If he was really going to kill alot of people then he wouldn’t be telling people he was going to do it. It’s just common sense. I believe he just wanted a little attention, nothing more.
Lets hope he gets outta jail soon, and the police give him back the guns the seized
For that comment, I banned him from leaving comments on my site.
The last time I heard from him was from an e-mail he sent me, which you can see here.
(UPDATE 7/1/2012: Some of the entries that Gill commented on have since been deleted from the site. However, I have created a standalone blog called Gill Was Here that has all his postings from my site.)
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What would we do without experts?
School shooters resist telltale patterns:
I did a phone interview with The Globe and Mail last night about the Dawson College shooting. It was done before we knew anything concrete about the situation. I’m not making excuses, just setting the time frame because I still stand behind what I said…
Trench Reynolds, the pseudonym of a Charlotte, N.C., man who runs a website devoted to school shootings, concluded from early reports that the Dawson rampage was another in a long line of copycat incidents that have followed the 1999 shooting at Columbine in which two students killed 12 fellow students and a teacher.
“To me, it sounds like a copycat almost to a T,” he said.
At the time, I meant the media reports reminded me of Columbine with the unconfirmed reports going out. However, knowing what we know now, I still stand behind my statement that Kimveer Gill was emulating Columbine in someway. The experts disagree…
But analysts say it would be a mistake to draw conclusions based on the gunman’s appearance.
“When you see something like a mohawk or a piercing, that is not a predictive behaviour of anything violent,” said Michael Hoechsmann, a McGill University educational psychologist. “I think it’s a dubious proposition to draw too many parallels to something that is unfolding right now.”
University of Toronto education professor Kathy Bickmore agreed. “It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that there’s a parallel in particular to Columbine,” she said, referring to the gunman’s trench coat. “But it’s not uncommon enough clothing for me to say that has anything to do with it.”
O RLY?..ahem…I mean, oh, really? I’m not basing this on a particular article of clothing but more of a subculture. For the most part, since Columbine, school shooters and would be shooters have been considered at some point goth, metal, punk, etc. They feel excluded because of their choice of music and dress. They sympathize with the Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold over their mythical status of being heroes to the outcasts and bullied, even though Harris and Klebold were neither, in my opinion.
“There is no real type,” said James Sheptycki, a criminologist at York University in Toronto. “Any psychological profile that people could come up with would identify too many individuals to actually be useful and wouldn’t necessarily fit all potential perpetrators. There simply isn’t a profile that works.”
Maybe not all perpetrators, but I think there’s a profile for most of them. Now I’m not saying all goths, punks, and metalheads, are potential school shooters. Just the ones that have a fascination or obsession with a certain Colorado school shooting.
Again thanks to Harding for the article.
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Interview with TheTrench
I want to thank author Sandra Ruttan for conducting an interview with me over at her blog.
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Trench in TIME
The Thin Blue Line at MySpace:
How’s your Memorial Day? Mine is kicking ass. Why, you ask? Well, in case you didn’t click the link, yours truly has made the pages of Time Magazine. I haven’t read the entire article myself, but so far, it looks promising. So be sure to pick up the June 6th issue of Time.
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A story of the south
I love living in the south, but the locals know next to nothing about good pizza. They prefer The Hut to most anything else.
However, a few years ago, some guys from Brooklyn opened a real pizza parlor in my town. I was in there about a year ago when I was waiting in line to pick up my pizzas.
The guy behind the counter said to a female customer in front of me, “Ok, here are your pies.” The woman said “I didn’t order pies. I ordered pizza.”
I about fell over trying not to laugh in this woman’s face.
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Gas Panic
This is the first time and last time you’ll see me talking about gas prices, unless to tell you what some assclown did because of it.
Now I’m sure this is going on all over the south tonight, but I specifically want to address the people of Charlotte, NC and the surrounding areas who rushed to the gas pumps today because of the downed pipelines in Louisiana…
*ahem*
You’re all a bunch of fucking idiots.
You all panicked, thinking the area was going to run out of gas. So what do you do? You rush to the gas pumps to quicken the depletion. Did you ever think to conserve gas? How about driving less? Maybe not using your car’s air conditioner. No, you didn’t. You bought into the fucking hype. And I really wonder how many of you had an actual urgent need for gas and how many of you still had 3/4 of a tank.
If Charlotte runs out of gas, it’s your fault.
Assclowns.
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Roundtable
Bookhouse Boy from The Crime Spree has posted a crimeblogging roundtable that took place between Bookhouse Boy, myself, the telegenic Steve Huff, and the lovely and talented Laura James.
Of course, all my answers are oversimplified and make me sound like an idiot compared to the others, but it’s a good read nonetheless. I’m hoping one day soon we can all get together on some kind of voice chat and record it for a podcast.
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Trench in the media…yet again
Online, teen is praised for alleged bomb plot:
Well, well, well. Look who made it into the media again. Yours truly. This time for the Andrew Osantowski case. But it’s factually incorrect as usual. While I appreciate that the article is trying to show how that there are kids like Osantowski out there that worship the Columbine killers, I have to take the Detroit Free Press to task for a couple of things…
“I don’t know about the rest of you mindless self-righteous people out there, but I, for one, salute Mr. Osantowski,” a posting signed by someone identified as The_Grandest_Dragon wrote on the Web site The Trenchcoat Chronicles .
The domain name is taken from the Trench Coat Mafia, a group Klebold and Harris belonged to. Although the site’s keeper apparently condemns their killing spree — America’s deadliest school shooting — many postings on the site defend them.
First off, my domain name does not come from “The Trenchcoat Mafia”. I’ve been referring to myself as “TheTrenchcoat” online since 1997. Secondly, the commenter who called himself The_Grandest_Dragon did, in fact, make that comment, but in his defense he also made the following comment in the same entry the first comment is taken from…
I have been reading your sight for quite some time now, and yeah i guess it has sunk in that im in the wrong. You are right trench, everyone you have talked about on this site, what they have done did nothing to make their lives or anyone else’s any better, and i guess life is just too short to hate everything all the time. Sorry about posting twice, i had a couple of ones after the exlcamation marks, i pressed stop but i guess it went through anyways. You where right and im sorry.
Comment by The_Grandest_Dragon — Friday Sep 24, 2004
Lastly, while the article does correctly state that I do condemn the Columbine killings, that point can’t be stressed enough, the impression the article gives me is that I somehow encourage the pro-Harris and Klebold comments that are left on my site. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While I do attract a large number of what I call “mutants” I leave their comments on my site for a reason. Part of what I’m trying to do here is to show parents and educators that there are kids out there that worship the Columbine killers. Check any one of my entries about Columbine or the mail I receive. Any one of these kids might be your son, daughter, relative, or student. It’s a growing problem that can’t be ignored.
So, If anyone coming to my site from the Detroit Free Press is now aware of the problem that I’m trying to expose, then the article has served a purpose. Other than that, being falsely misrepresented in the media? Yeah, I don’t know what that’s like.
And please do not e-mail the author of the article. I have already done so, expressing my concerns.
UPDATE: I exchanged e-mails with the author of the article, and she was willing to rectify the situation. Also, I accidentally deleted some comments from this entry. I’m monkeying with a new spam blocker and it may have deleted some comments.
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Happy Anniversary
Tomorrow, September 28, in the year of our Lord 2002, marks the 5th anniversary of my website in some form or another. And since I don’t post on Saturdays right now, I’m going to celebrate today. It all started 5 years ago on a crappy little Tripod site that was started for me by a woman who called herself Sentira. She was the artist behind the original “TheTrenchcoat” picture. So Sentira if you’re out there somewhere reading this, thank you. And since that day I’ve been addicted to making and maintaining my websites.
First, there was “The Lair of TheTrenchcoat” which also contained some of my (ugh)poetry. Then I started writing more, and I split the site in two and had The Lair plus “The Written Works of TheTrenchcoat” which were two completely different sites. Then Columbine happened, and I landed on the front page of the Washington comPost, so I decided to lie low. I changed the site to “Patrick Black: The Usual Suspect”. Then I changed it to “Suspect’s Symphony of Sychosis”. And eventually, I changed it to “The Written Works of the 13th Suspect”. After a while, I got tired of being a suspect and wanted to be a good guy again. So then I started “Patrick Black’s No Cure for Cancer” which for the first time featured a rant section. Then a friend of mine told me about Namezero which at the time was offering free top-level domain names. So I registered TheTrenchcoat.Org and split the sites up again into “The Written Works of TheTrenchcoat” and “The Gospel According to Vigilante 13”. Having 2 different names for the same persona didn’t last long, and I changed it to “The Gospel of TheTrenchcoat”. And those two stayed that way for a while. Then I tried my hand at a Real Audio music site called “Radio Free Trenchcoat” so now I had three separate sites. Then in April 2001, I signed up with Xanga and registered the domain name of thetrenchcoat.com. The idea was to have the Xanga site be a portal to my other three sites. That didn’t work out. So I combined “Gospel” and “Written” into “TheTrenchcoat Anthology” under thetrenchcoat.com and killed the music site. Then I found out how to host my own blog and added it to “The Anthology”. I made the blog the front page of the site, which is now what you see before you…”TheTrenchcoat Chronicles”. And in another year I’ll probably be calling it something else.
And I’ve used several different web hosts as well. Tripod, Geocities, WBS/Go.com, Angelfire, Freeservers, 0catch, and V3 Space. And let me tell you, a paid host is the way to go.